Notwithstanding the marked improvement in knowledge of particular Melanesian languages and groups of languages in recent years, there are still many questions that have to be answered before we can say that the field of language contact and change has been adequately covered. Just how far we still have to go can perhaps be most simply illustrated by pointing out that, whereas the results of An-NAn contact figure prominently in the discussion above, those of An-An contact do so only to a much lesser degree. This can be shown by a table such as the following that displays the types of contact studies that have figured in the discussion above. In this ‘#’ indicates that no case has been adequately described to date and ‘+’ means one or more cases have been reported:

Although crude, this table is nevertheless quite instructive because it clearly shows that the types of reported cases are skewed in favour of An-NAn contact. Thus, while An-NAn contact has produced all possible results, An-An contact seems to result only in different types of borrowing. To what can this skewing be attributed? Does it merely represent poor socio-linguistic investigation and reporting, or are there other explanations? To answer these sorts of questions we need more in-depth studies of particular cases focused not only on traditional descriptive and comparative historical questions, but also on such aspects as the following that Grace (1975, 1985, 1990) has drawn attention to:

In other words we need much more detailed information than we have had hitherto. With many new scholars entering the field, better trained than in the past, there is every prospect of achieving the desired goals.