How did PNG’s Tok Pisin newspaper get started?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at Wantok Niuspepa and ask why it was started and why it is important to have news in Tok Pisin.

IF you are reading this article, you or someone in your household must have picked up The National from a newspaper seller in town.
Next to him there will probably be the other daily newspaper, the Post-Courier. You might also have seen a newspaper in Tok Pisin for sale, Wantok.
How did that newspaper get started and what has its role been in the development of Tok Pisin as a written language?
People have been writing in Tok Pisin since the German colonial period before World War I. Catholic missionaries wrote dictionaries for other newly arrived German missionaries, and both Lutheran and Catholic missionaries started to use Tok Pisin for liturgy and other church-related activities.
Usually these were typewritten manuscripts. The first uses of Tok Pisin in letters by Papua New Guineans also stem from this time.
By the 1930s, the SVD (Societas Verbum Divine – Society of Divine Word) Catholic missionaries had already started a typed monthly church newsletter in Tok Pisin, Frend Bilong Mi, which they started to print and circulate in 1940, just before the outbreak of World War II in the South Pacific made this kind of project impossible.
After World War II, a new generation of missionaries came to PNG. Among them was Francis Mihalic, an SVD Catholic priest from the United States, who quickly became interested in the use of Tok Pisin as a written language.
Working with linguist Robert Hall, he established a way of writing Tok Pisin that recognised that it was a language in its own right, and not some kind of broken or baby English. Up to this time, many people were writing Tok Pisin sentences as if the words were English words, such as suppose you hungry, you come here to this fellow place, whereas in Mihalic’s and Hall’s system it became sapos yu hangre, yu kam hia long dispela ples.
This spelling was accepted as official by the colonial Department of Education in 1955. Fr Mihalic used it in his Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin, which for many years was the most widely circulated Tok Pisin – English dictionary in the country.
By the mid-1960s there were 24 local Tok Pisin newsletters produced by mission or government organisations in different parts of what was then called Papua and New Guinea. In 1962 the first national newspaper in Tok Pisin, NuGini Tok Tok, appeared. It struggled to succeed, and ended up being taken over by the Post-Courier, which turned it into a one-page Tok Pisin insert in what was then the major newspaper in the country. This first attempt at a national Tok Pisin newspaper disappeared in 1970.
To take its place, Fr Mihalic used the resources of the church to train a group of Papua New Guinean journalists in Wewak and launched Wantok newspaper. He had a strong feeling that PNG could develop only if its people had knowledge about how the world operated and so he saw writing in Tok Pisin as an important part of nation-building.
Although he relied on church resources to set up and circulate his new newspaper, he made it clear that his new publication was a commercial newspaper, not a church mouthpiece.
The newspaper was an important vehicle for informing ordinary people about developments leading up to Independence. Even though knowledge of English is much more widespread today than it was then, Wantok Niuspepa continues to inform people with limited English skills about national and world events.
From its beginning, another important role of Wantok has been to spread awareness about the standard spelling of Tok Pisin. In the absence of any government plans to develop Tok Pisin as a written medium, Wantok Niuspepa, together with the Tok Pisin Buk Baibel, is a vehicle to educate people in all parts of the country about how to spell Tok Pisin in a standard way that is clear to readers everywhere.
As the current editor of the newspaper wrote me, if there is no uniform way to spell Tok Pisin, it will be difficult for people in different places to read and write in the language. The Stailbuk bilong Wantok Niuspepa that Fr Mihalic wrote for his journalists continues to be the only detailed style manual for Tok Pisin that addresses spelling and other writing issues, such as how to coin new Tok Pisin words that are not in any dictionary.
This is important, as Wantok Niuspepa is an important mechanism for introducing easily understood Tok Pisin expressions for new concepts and technology.
There is a tendency for bilingual urban users of Tok Pisin and English to adopt English vocabulary and phrases into Tok Pisin.
While this is not a problem in groups where everyone is educated and can understand English, it can cause real problems when speaking to people with little schooling or who don’t have a good grasp of English. The articles in Wantok Niuspepa can act as a model for how to talk about world events or controversial topics in Tok Pisin, so that people can be understood by everyone no matter how much or how little formal education they have had, saying, for example, kantri bai gohet wantaim ol dispela mak bilong gavman instead of divelopmen bilong nesen bai impruv sapos yumi achivim ol dispela gol.
In a thriving democracy with a well-informed public, there is a need for different kinds of media that serve different groups within society. In a multilingual society such as PNG, it is especially important that those who do not read English well or not at all still have access to knowledge in a language they can understand.
Wantok Niuspepa has done this for more than half a century and in the process has helped to spread the standardised spelling of Tok Pisin and act as a model of how to communicate simply and efficiently in the language.

• 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.