How many pidgin languages does PNG have?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at PNG’s pidgin languages— just how many does the country have and what are they?

WHEN someone asks you if you speak Pidgin, they are probably talking about Tok Pisin, the English-based language that the majority of Papua New Guineans use as a common language. But this is not the only pidgin language in the country.
By pidgin languages, we mean new languages that develop when people speaking different languages come together and try to communicate. These languages have their own vocabulary, usually taken from the native languages of the different speech communities. They also have their own sound systems, which tend to be simpler than those of the native languages the speakers use. And they have their own grammatical structures, which incorporate whatever common features the speakers’ native languages share. The vocabulary, sound system, and grammatical structures can be very highly developed when the language is used for many purposes and over a long period of time, such as is the case with Tok Pisin, or very simple and rudimentary, as is the case when the speakers have only limited short-term contact with one another.
Given the extreme linguistic diversity of Melanesia, we can expect that pidgin languages must have developed in many places as people speaking different languages came together and found that they had no common means of communication.
Two examples of this that were recent enough to be recorded in writing are the Hiri trading languages used between Motuans and Purari River people in what is today Gulf Province during the Motuans’ Hiri trading expeditions. The Motu language is an Austronesian language, while the languages spoken in the Purari River delta are mainly Eleman languages such as Toaripi, completely unrelated to Austronesian languages.
One of the languages used by the traders was a simplified way of speaking based on common features found in the various Eleman languages. This was commonly used in villages where Motuan traders stayed over long periods of time waiting for the winds to change so they could return home. The other trading language was a simplified form of Motu that some Purari people used when talking with Motuan traders who visited their villages for short periods of time.
A more widely spoken pidgin language based on Motu was Police Motu, which today is called Hiri Motu, although it is quite different from the pidgin language used in the Hiri trade expeditions. It developed when men speaking various Pacific languages were brought to Port Moresby by the British colonisers to form their new colonial police force.
Many of these men ended up marrying Motu women. Motuans already had a tradition of speaking to outsiders in a simplified form of their language, and they used this with their new in-laws. At the same time, the policemen used this simplified form of Motu to speak to each other, so that it ended up becoming the common language of the police force, and was even learned by the force’s British and Australian officers.
As government rule was spread by the police throughout Papua, the language was carried to new areas so that it became a common language for people outside the police force as well. People living closer to Port Moresby have tended to use more of the complicated noun and verb suffixes used by the Motu people, while those who live further away and do not speak Austronesian languages have spoken a simpler variety without as many Motu grammatical suffixes.
While the southern half of the island of New Guinea was colonised by the British, the northern part of the New Guinea mainland and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago were colonised by Germans, who started their rule by “blackbirding” large numbers of people to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and German Samoa.
These people spoke many different languages and joined other Melanesians from the Solomon Islands and what is today Vanuatu already working on ships or plantations. Together they developed a way to communicate by using the English words they heard from ship officers and plantation managers and fitting them into sentences using grammatical constructions that were common to their mainly Austronesian languages.
When New Guinea Islanders returned home to the Bismarck Archipelago, they brought this South Pacific Pidgin English with them so that it became a way for people from different parts of the new German colony to communicate with each other and with Germans, who also learned it.
Since Rabaul was the centre of German administration and commerce, many words from Kuanua and New Ireland languages as well as German started to be used in this pidgin language. The result came to be known as Tok Pisin and is the language most of us use today to speak to people outside our own language group.
Ship crews and returned blackbirded plantation labourers developed a related pidgin language in parts of Papua. This Papuan Pidgin English lacked the German, Kuanua, and New Ireland influences found in Tok Pisin. This disappeared in most areas of Papua with the introduction of Police Motu, but it did become the ancestor of the distinctive form of English spoken today in Milne Bay.

Another pidgin language developed during the German colonial time, spoken by a small group of mixed-race children who were taken from their mothers and brought to a boarding school at the Vunapope Catholic Mission. These children were educated in German and were prohibited from speaking to each other in Tok Pisin or their mothers’ languages.
As they were moved to the boarding school and were learning German, the habit grew that amongst themselves they would speak in a way that was like Tok Pisin but using German instead of English words. Today a small number of their descendants, mainly living in Australia, still speak this language, which they call Unserdeutsch (“our German”).
As we can see from these six languages, Melanesians have reacted to language contact over the years and in quite different circumstances with a determination to communicate across language barriers. Undoubtedly before PNG languages were recorded in writing, there must have been other pidgin languages that arose in similar multilingual environments over the thousands of years as the ancestors of today’s Papua New Guineans encountered each other to trade or establish new settlements.
The exact number of pidgin languages in PNG may never be known — we can safely say there have been at least six and probably many more.
l 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.