Old dictionaries and history of Tok Pisin

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at dictionaries of Tok Pisin and asking what they tell us about the history of Tok Pisin.

FOR a number of years, researchers at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany have been documenting the influence of German on various languages, looking especially at German words that have entered neighbouring languages.
As can be expected, much of their work has been about the German influence on neighbouring European languages, such as English, French, and Russian. But for more than a decade, two researchers at the Institute, Stefan Engelberg and Doris Stolberg, have been looking beyond Europe to see what German words exist in Tok Pisin today and which words existed in the past. For their research they collected as many Tok Pisin dictionaries as possible and digitalised these dictionaries for their research team to use.
This was easier to do in Germany than in PNG itself because of the many German missionaries who deposited copies of their work in German libraries where they were kept in good condition and protected against insects and mould and, unlike copies of dictionaries stored at mission stations in Melanesia, were not destroyed in the fierce fighting of World War II. This is probably the world’s best digital collection of Tok Pisin dictionaries in the world, and together with the Institute’s collection of the original notes and recordings made by pioneer Tok Pisin linguist Peter Muehlhaeusler, makes Mannheim, Germany one of the world’s best sites for studying the history of Tok Pisin.

So what do these dictionaries tell us about the evolution of Tok Pisin?
The oldest dictionary in the collection is William Churchill’s 1911 “Beach-La-Mar. The jargon or trade speech of the Western Pacific” and the latest is the Oxford University Press dictionary that I first edited in 2008 and revised and improved for a new release two months ago.
What is sadly striking about this century of Tok Pisin lexicography is that with the noticeable exception of a trilingual Indonesian-Tok Pisin-English dictionary written by the late Dicks Thomas with Indonesian colleagues, there have been no dictionaries written by actual native Tok Pisin speakers.
While it is understandable that for much of the early 20th century there were no Papua New Guineans with the educational background necessary to compile dictionaries, one would think that by the 21st century this would no longer be the case.
This is unfortunate because, even though most of the foreign compilers of the dictionaries would have been fluent users of Tok Pisin, they would still rarely have the intuitive insight into the language that people would have who had grown up with the language. When we look at the dictionaries written before World War II, we see many more German words than we use today and see in dictionaries written since Independence. This is not surprising, given that the northern half of today’s PNG was a German colony until 1914, and even after the Australian takeover, education and rural development in many areas continued to be in the hands of German Lutheran and Catholic missionaries.
Local people at schools and mission stations would have had close contact with these German missionaries, so we see German words for greetings, such as “Gris God” (from German “Gruess Gott”, literally “Greet God”) for “good day”.
We also see German words for new items that the missionaries introduced, such as “shrank” (from German “Schrank”) for “closet”. Perhaps the most surprising word of German origin is “kakalak”, from the German word for “cockroach”, which we are told used to be the Tok Pisin word for both the insect and for “young child”!
And given the stereotype of the importance of obedience in German culture, it is perhaps not surprising to see “strafe”, the German word for “punishment” listed as a Tok Pisin noun. Although we do still have a few high frequency words of German origin, such as “blut” and “raus”, most of these German words have disappeared.
Because most of the pre-World War II dictionaries were written by Catholic missionaries, we see many Latin words for religious concepts, such as “eklesia” for “church community” or “mandato” for “commandment”. Like most of the German words, the majority of these Latin words have been replaced by English words in modern Tok Pisin.

We do not know how accurately these old dictionaries represent actual spoken speech. The dictionaries often have words with “sh”, “ch”, and “j” sounds that are uncommon in spoken Tok Pisin even today. If the dictionaries do represent the pronunciations of the pre-World War II era, then people at that time spoke Tok Pisin in a way that was much closer to English than that of their children and grandchildren.
One of the interesting things about these old dictionaries is how so much of what we think of as typical Tok Pisin grammar the -pela endings of adjectives (“gutpela”, “bikpela”, “naispela”), the -im ending of transitive verbs (verbs such as “lukim” and “katim” that must be followed by a direct object), and the difference between inclusive “yumi” and exclusive “mipela” was present in Tok Pisin from the earliest time that it was written down. It seems that the basic principles of Tok Pisin grammar were established quite early.
The dictionaries also show us the development of the spelling systems used to represent spoken Tok Pisin. In the beginning there were two main tendencies, one spelling words as they are in English, regarding Tok Pisin as a kind of broken English, and one sounding the words out and writing them down as the authors heard them.
The first approach was more favoured by Australians and other English speakers and can be especially seen in a 1943 dictionary for Allied soldiers that has sentences such as “Man belong Japan e savvy come long arp ere?” and “You no can tell im out im me, pass im mouse!”.
The second approach was more favoured by German missionaries who had to use Tok Pisin in their missionary work and who approached Tok Pisin as a language quite separate from English.
This ended up being the approach used in Fr Frank Mihalic’s dictionary that became the standard for the spelling system eventually used in the Tok Pisin Bible and Wantok Niuspepa.
The Institute for the German Language plans to make PDFs of these dictionaries available online for the public to use.
When they do, they will provide Papua New Guineans with a valuable link to the early development of the language that now unites the nation.
Let us hope that they will encourage Papua New Guinean linguists to prepare dictionaries themselves to describe the way the language evolves in the rest of the 21st century.

• 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.