Since the first PARLE conference, PARLE '87, attracted more than 300 participants, it was considered a useful and successful forum and encouraged the organization of this second issue known as PARLE '89. The initiative for these conferences was taken by project 415 of ESPRIT (the European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology of the Commission of the European Communities). Their scope covers central themes in the area of parallel architectures and languages, including such topics as concurrent, object-oriented, logic and functional programming; MIMD, dataflow, inference and reduction machines; design and verification of parallel systems; VLSI, WSI and RISC architectures; performance evaluation, memory management, systolic arrays, applications and special purpose architectures. The five invited lectures present the state of the art and advanced developments in major research areas related to the topics of the conference. Of the more than 150 submitted papers, 45 were selected for presentation. Furthermore the program of PARLE '89 comprises presentations on the subprojects which together constitute ESPRIT project 415. Parallel architectures based on a variety of programming styles (object-oriented, logic, functional, dataflow) are represented in these overviews.