Abstract

In a number of areas, in particular in the Pacific region, it has been observed that languages have undergone simplification processes of their usually very elaborate grammatical structures, and that such elaborate grammatical features have decayed and in some cases entirely disappeared from some languages, hand in hand with the progressing decay, and falling into disuse, of the traditional cultures of the speakers of such languages. Such phenomena of simplification and decay of grammatical complexities are most readily observable in Papuan languages of the New Guinea area and have also been found in Australian Aboriginal languages. Both these languages have very complex grammatical systems, the Papuan languages even more so than the Australian Aboriginal languages, and the multiplicity of grammatical features in them lend themselves more readily to simplification than may be the case with other languages in the Pacific area, such as Austronesian languages, also called Malayo-Polynesian languages, though such phenomena are by no means absent from them.