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Bilingual Education in the Pacific Islands

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Bilingual and Multilingual Education

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Language and Education ((ELE))

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with bilingual education in the Pacific Islands, that is, those islands usually included in Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia but excluding Irian Jaya (West Papua) and New Zealand, which are discussed in a separate chapter. It therefore does include Hawai‘i, since it is a Polynesian island group even though it is a state of the United States, and Rapanui (Easter Island), also Polynesian, though it is a territory of Chile. The Pacific Islands, while relatively lightly populated, contain many languages (over 1,000, so about one-fifth of the languages of the world) and have in common that the literacy and formal education in the vernacular introduced by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century have been supplemented or replaced by education in metropolitan languages, mostly English and French, resulting in many having transitional bilingual education systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These are three convenient and familiar geographical divisions, and no claim is made here that they constitute linguistic or cultural areas.

  2. 2.

    Papuan languages are non-Austronesian languages spoken in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (and parts of Indonesia). Though grouped together for convenience, they belong to a number of language families, perhaps 20-odd. Some linguists, however, do believe them to be all related, and some also believe that they are remotely related to Austronesian languages.

  3. 3.

    Information on missionization is mostly from Garrett (1982), population and political status from Crocombe (2008), and statistics on languages and speakers are based on Lewis et al. (2014). Note the following abbreviations: LMS London Missionary Society , founded in 1795 by various Calvinist churches (Garrett 1982, p. 9); MSC - French Missionaries of the Sacred Heart ; Picpus - French Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary ; Marists - priests (and brothers) of the France-based Society of Mary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts, Law and Education, School of Language, Arts & Media, The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji

    Paul Geraghty

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  1. Paul Geraghty
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Correspondence to Paul Geraghty .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, New York, USA

    Ofelia García

  2. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong

    Angel M. Y. Lin

  3. Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stephen May

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Geraghty, P. (2017). Bilingual Education in the Pacific Islands. In: García, O., Lin, A., May, S. (eds) Bilingual and Multilingual Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02258-1_24

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