Are we the only ones with a pidgin English?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at pidgin English and ask just how unique PNG’s pidgin English is. Or isn’t..

WHEN I went from PNG to start graduate studies at the University of Hawai’i, one of the first things I did was lock myself out of my apartment. When a neighbour came to lend a hand, I was surprised when she started speaking to me in what I thought was perfect PNG Tok Pisin: “Yu no laik yusim hama?” (“You don’t want to use a hammer?”) and “No ken brukim, isi” (“Don’t break it, slowly!’).
It turned out she wasn’t speaking PNG Tok Pisin, but her own Hawai’i Pidgin. It has its own rules and vocabulary, but shares a lot of similarities with PNG Tok Pisin. Sometimes these similarities made me as a visitor from PNG laugh, like when I saw “The Royal Kaukau Restaurant” (I found out later that in Hawai’i, “kaukau’ means “kaikai”).
I had a similar experience when I got into a taxi after arriving at the airport in Port Vila, Vanuatu for the first time. I knew that Vanuatu Bislama and PNG Tok Pisin are closely related, so I started speaking with the taxi driver in PNG Tok Pisin like I would at home. I was surprised when the driver asked me if I was one of “olgeta waetman” (“those white men”) who had stayed in Vanuatu after independence and become citizens. He in turn was surprised when I told him I had just got off the plane and it was my first time in his country. My PNG Tok Pisin was so close to his Vanuatu Bislama that he took me for a local.
As these examples show, PNG is far from alone in having a pidgin English. Further afield from the Pacific, there are English-based pidgins spoken in the Caribbean, western Africa, Asia, Australia, and, through immigration even in London itself. How did they all develop and to what extent are they similar to each other?
Pidgin languages generally develop when people are suddenly brought together who need to communicate amongst themselves, but who don’t already have a common language and are not given proper training in a new language. Often this is in times of traumatic movements of people, such as in the Atlantic slave trade or the attempted genocide of Australian Aborigines, while at other times it is a less traumatic, but still sudden, movement of people, such as when Europeans moved in and established plantations and colonial administrations in Melanesia.

When this happens, people from many languages suddenly live and work together, sometimes even sharing the same house. In trying to speak with each other, they take words that they all hear their foreign bosses or supervisors use and put them together using the grammatical rules of their own languages. The result is a new way of talking that we call a pidgin language.
The past five hundred years have been the age of European colonialism, with movements of people around the globe. With these movements, sailors and forced or voluntary migrant workers have spread pidgin languages from one place to another. The first powerful colonial power was Portugal, so it is not surprising that the oldest pidgin languages are based on Portuguese. Later, when English-speaking countries moved into the areas where the

Portuguese had been established, the people they encountered tried to adapt English words to the Portuguese pidgins that they already knew. Some common Portuguese words survived, however, which is why most pidgin Englishes have words similar to Tok Pisin pikinini, from Portuguese “pequeno” (little one”), and save, from Portuguese “saber” (“know”).
Sometimes a word exists in many of the indigenous languages spoken by the first pidgin speakers, such as susu (“breast” or “milk”), which is found in Austronesian languages throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This found its way into the pidgin Englishes of the South Pacific, but is absent in pidgin Englishes in the Atlantic region. Those Caribbean and West African pidgin Englishes have their own special vocabularies and grammar rules, which means they cannot be understood by people speaking Pacific pidgin Englishes.
In today’s post-colonial world, pidgin Englishes still function as common languages in a number of countries where indigenous people speak many different languages, such as PNG, Vanuatu, Cameroon, and Nigeria. In other places, such as the South Carolina Sea Islands, Jamaica or Hawai’i, where indigenous people were killed or assimilated, pidgin Englishes have become the first language of the descendants of people brought in as plantation labourers.
Linguists call these pidgin languages that have become the first language of a new group of people “creoles”.
While most countries with pidgin Englishes use standard English as the language of education and government administration, local pidgins and creoles are an important mark of local and national culture and identity.
Few Papua New Guineans living overseas, for example, fail to break into a broad smile when they hear a white person addressing them in Tok Pisin. And what would Jamaican reggae music sound like without its expressive and poetic Jamaican creole lyrics? Pidgin Englishes have also made contributions to international Standard English, such as “long time no see” from the Chinese Pidgin English of Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton).
No matter what their history may have been in colonialism and inequality, today pidgin and creole Englishes are symbols of identity and creativity. Without them, our world would be a much poorer place.

• Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland, and an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at http://[email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.