The college of St. Barnabas on Norfolk Island and its languages: An early example of missionary language planning

This article discusses the difficulties of devising and implementing workable mission language policies in one of the world’s linguistically most diverse regions. In spite of ample funding and the involvement of professional linguists, the ambitious project of making Mota the lingua franca of the south-western Pacific was a failure. One of the principal reasons for this was that the Melanesian missionaries saw intercommunication as a technical problem and failed to consider the social and cultural factors that determine the success or failure of any language plan.