The Third International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics was held in Bali, Indonesi a, in January 1981. Amran Halim, as Conference Organiser, and Stephen Wurm, as OCICAL committee member (and now its Chairman), and also as General Editor of Pacific Linguistics publications, decided that in addition to the Proceedings volume which would be produced in Jakarta, a selection of papers should be published, largely for the international readership, by pacific Linguistics. This is the second in a series of modest volumes presenting a selection of the papers from the conference: it includes papers concerning the Western Austronesian area, tracking the comparative relationships of the lan guages of this area, following the interaction of language upon language over periods of time both great and small, tracking the genesis of these shifting, changing languages, and tracking phonological changes in the area. Volume 1 in the series, Currents in Oceanic, has already appeared; volume 3, which includes papers on sociolinguistics, and is titled Accent on variety, and volume 4, containing papers on syntax, morphology, etc. and titled Thema tic variation, will follow shortly.