Among the first linguistic innovations during early colonization/ missionization in Bosavi was the introduction of vocabularies and discourses of marking and keeping various types of European-based time. The introduction of European-style institutionally organized activities in which participation was regimented and monitored, e.g., paid and unpaid labor schemes, schools, and churches, gave rise to ways of talking about dividing days, weeks, months, years and was based on Kaluli, Tok Pisin and English. Individuals who aligned themselves with mission or government organizations used European chronologies to differentiate themselves and their activities from those who were not similarly positioned. Simultaneously, new genres emerged, such as literacy lessons, cassette letters, and sermons that delineated time in terms of oppositional dichotomies that were temporally less specific but nonetheless were linked to notions of social differentiation. Some genres predominantly focused on oppositions between a past and a present; others related current actions and attitudes to contrast with future consequences and possibilities, both positive and negative. Speakers who used these new vocabularies and discourses of time deployed them to index themselves and others as specific types of persons with various orientations to membership in a Christian community and/or identification with a nation-state.