The Oceanic Lexicon Project is producing a multi-volume series reconstructing the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the languages ancestral to most of the Austronesian languages of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. By paying particular attention to the semantics of terminologies, we are learning much about the material culture, social organisation, and cosmology of Proto Oceanic speakers and about the ways in which they categorised and adapted to the environment.

The spread of the Oceanic languages across the Pacific was a remarkable event in prehistory. Beginning in the 2nd millenium BC, speakers of the Oceanic branch of Austronesian spread eastward from north-west Melanesia into previously uninhabited regions, their speech eventually diversifying into some 450 languages. This linguistic spread initially corresponds to the expansion of the Lapita Culture, identified by archaeologists especially through the spread of pottery.

The first two volumes of The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic are now available in Pacific Linguistics.