Do PNG’s creole language follow a ‘bioprogram’?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at three creole languages in PNG — Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, and Unserdeutsch — and examine them to see to what extent they fit into one famous linguist’s theory of a human language bioprogram.

By CRAIG ALAN VOLKER
To begin with we need to define what a creole language is and what these three languages have in common. We can classify human languages as being natural languages, pidgin languages, and creole languages.
Most languages are natural languages, that change relatively slowly and which can usually be shown to be related to other languages with which they share a common ancestor. These languages change from generation to generation, and when different groups of people speaking the languages have little contact with each other, they change in different ways, slowly becoming different languages over time.
For example, when people moved from southern New Ireland to the Duke of York Islands and the Gazelle Peninsula, at first the migrants spoke the same language as their relatives who stayed in southern New Ireland. But over the centuries, as speech changed in different ways on the different islands, people could no longer understand each other. The languages on New Ireland, the Duke of York Islands, and the Gazelle Peninsula had gradually changed into different languages.
Pidgin languages develop more quickly, when different groups of people come into close contact and do not speak each other’s languages. If there is a dominant language, people will use words from that language and put them into sentences using the grammar of their own languages. This is what the Melanesian workers did when they were brought together on ships and plantations in the early colonial period. They used English words that they heard from the dominant Europeans in sentences that had very Pacific ways of pronunciation
and grammar.

Creole languages are languages that arise suddenly when people come into close contact, marry, and have children who speak new languages. Creole languages can be found in many places where colonialists brought willing or unwilling workers together to work on plantations, mixing with or replacing the indigenous populations.
For many years, linguists have been trying to work out how these creole languages develop. The most generally held view is that at first, pidgin languages develop, and then children are born who grow up hearing these languages in their homes and communities. When these children grow up and marry each other, the pidgin language is then the home language and the first language of their own children. In this way the pidgin language is nativised (linguists say “creolised”) by a population, so that the creole language is a daughter language of the pidgin language.
In the 1970s British-American linguist Derek Bickerton developed a different theory. He noticed that there were many grammatical similarities between creole languages in the Caribbean and West Africa, which have many historical connections, and Hawaii, which has almost no historical connections with either the Caribbean or West Africa.
He developed a theory that this was because the violent and sudden environments of slavery in the Caribbean and West Africa or of large scale Asian immigration to the plantations of Hawaii were similar. In all of these places, there was much intermarriage between people speaking different languages.
Children in these mixed families did not have many chances to learn their hard-working parents’ languages. Instead, they used words from the pidgin language their parents spoke and relied on a basic language programme that they had been born with to form a way of speaking. Bickerton called this inborn human language facility the human “bioprogram”.
According to this bioprogram theory, creole languages therefore represent an almost instinctive way of speaking. Bickerton said that in order for this bioprogram to kick in, there had to be a sudden break with a family’s natural language(s), there could be no formal education, there had to be some — but not much — contact with a dominant language (usually the colonisers’ language), which had to be spoken by only a small percentage of the population.
These conditions existed in the slave societies of the Caribbean and the plantation societies of Hawaii, but what about PNG? We can look at three creole languages— Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, and Rabaul Creole German — that developed in the colonial era to see whether Bickerton’s bioprogram theory is relevant in this country.
Today, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu are spoken by children in many families as first languages, so we can say that these languages are being creolised. But this process has been very slow, not sudden. The earliest records we have of children who spoke Tok Pisin as their native language are from the 1890s, but even today, over a century later, most people still speak their own languages in addition to Tok Pisin. This is different from the situation with the creole languages of the Caribbean and Hawaii, where we know that children stopped speaking their ancestral languages and switched to the creole languages in only one generation.
The situation with Hiri Motu is similar to Tok Pisin. The first speakers of Hiri Motu were colonial policemen from Fiji and other British colonies in the Pacific, which is why the language used to be called Police Motu. They did often marry local women and use Hiri Motu at home, but their children usually grew up close to their mothers’ extended families, so they continued to speak their mothers’ languages.
It was not until much later that families emerged where Hiri Motu was the only home language. Even today, such families are very much in the minority, and Hiri Motu is still a second language for most of its speakers.
Rabaul Creole German or Unserdeutsch was spoken by a small number of mixed-race families in the Gazelle Peninsula. It started when these mixed-race children were brought to the Vunapope Catholic Mission orphanage. While their removal from their native languages was as abrupt as that of African slaves brought to the Caribbean, unlike those slaves, they were given formal education in the colonisers’ language, German, so they also spoke fluent Standard German and the creole language that developed is much more German-like than the Caribbean creoles are like English, French, or Portuguese.
We can see that even if there is a natural bioprogram that explains the origin of creole languages in Hawaii and the Caribbean, the conditions for the development of creole languages in PNG are such that it is irrelevant for languages here.
Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu developed so slowly that it is obvious that there is a natural progression from these languages being used as pidgin second languages to being used as creole first languages. History shows that the development of Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) was more abrupt and sudden, but the existence of formal education in German inhibited any emergence of a natural bioprogram. If there is an inborn bioprogram, it is not relevant for explanations about the origin and development of creole languages in PNG.

• 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 [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page