Tok Pisin ( , ; ), often referred to by English speakers as New Guinea Pidgin or simply Pidgin, is an English creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an official language of Papua New Guinea and the most widely used language in the country. In parts of the southern provinces of Western, Gulf, Central, Oro, and Milne Bay, the use of Tok Pisin has a shorter history and is less universal, especially among older people.
Between five and six million people use Tok Pisin to some degree, though not all speak it fluently. Many now learn it as a first language, in particular the children of parents or grandparents who originally spoke different languages (for example, a mother from Madang and a father from Rabaul). Urban families in particular, and those of police and defence force members, often communicate among themselves in Tok Pisin, either never gaining fluency in a local language () or learning a local language as a second (or third) language after Tok Pisin (and possibly English). Over the decades, Tok Pisin has increasingly overtaken Hiri Motu as the dominant lingua franca among town-dwellers. Perhaps one million people now use Tok Pisin as a primary language. Tok Pisin is slowly "crowding out" other languages of Papua New Guinea.
originates from English talk, but has a wider application, also meaning 'word, speech, language'. derives from the English word pidgin; the latter, in turn, may originate in the word business, due to the typical development and use of pidgins as inter-ethnic trade languages.
While Tok Pisin's name in the language is , it is also called "New Guinea Pidgin" in English. Papua New Guinean anglophones often call Tok Pisin "Pidgin" when speaking English. This usage of "Pidgin" (with capital P) differs from the term pidgin (language) as used in linguistics. In spite of its name, Tok Pisin is not a pidgin in the latter sense, because it has become a first language for many people (rather than simply a lingua franca to facilitate communication with speakers of other languages). As such, it is considered a creole in linguistic terminology.
The Tok Pisin language is a result of Pacific Islanders intermixing. When colonial authorities forced people speaking numerous different languages to work on plantations in Queensland and various islands during blackbirding, the labourers began to develop a pidgin drawing vocabulary primarily from English, but also from German, Malay, Portuguese, and their own Austronesian languages (perhaps especially Kuanua, that of the Tolai people of East New Britain).
This English-based pidgin evolved into Tok Pisin in German New Guinea (where the German-based creole Unserdeutsch was also spoken), which became a widely used lingua franca between colonial authorities and the indigenous population. Tok Pisin and the closely related Bislama in Vanuatu and Pijin in the Solomon Islands, which developed in parallel, have traditionally been treated as varieties of a single Melanesian Pidgin English or "Neo-Melanesian" language. The flourishing of the mainly English-based Tok Pisin in German New Guinea (despite the language of the metropolitan power being German) contrasts with Hiri Motu, the lingua franca of Papua, which derived not from English but from Motu, the language of the indigenous people of the Port Moresby area.
Tok Pisin phonology and grammar strongly resembles Bislama and Pijin, but contrasts in several ways. The genitive preposition, derived from English belong, is in Tok Pisin, but blong in Bislama and Pijin. Similarly, the adjectival ending derived from English fellow is in Tok Pisin, but -fala in Bislama and Pijin. Certain phonological changes also occurred differently between Tok Pisin and Bislama.
Along with English and Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin is one of Papua New Guinea's three official languages. It is frequently the language of debate in the national parliament. Most government documents are produced in English, but public information campaigns are often partially or entirely in Tok Pisin. While English is the main language in the education system, some schools use Tok Pisin in the first three years of elementary education to promote early literacy.
There are considerable variations in vocabulary and grammar in various parts of Papua New Guinea, with distinct dialects in the New Guinea Highlands, the north coast of Papua New Guinea, and islands outside of New Guinea. For example, Pidgin speakers from Finschhafen speak rather quickly and often have difficulty making themselves understood elsewhere. The variant spoken on Bougainville and Buka is moderately distinct from that of New Ireland and East New Britain but is much closer to that than it is to the Pijin spoken in the rest of the Solomon Islands.
There are 4 sociolects of Tok Pisin:
Tok Pisin's current alphabet has 21 letters, five of which are vowels, and four digraphs. The letters are (vowels in italics):
Three of the digraphs, , , and , denote diphthongs; the fourth, , is used for both and .
Prior to the creation of the current orthography by the colonial Department of Education in 1955 to increase literacy, colonial administrators spelled Tok Pisin etymologically, spelling each Tok Pisin word identically to its original spelling in the language that the word derived from. However, this spelling system did not have a standardized spelling of certain terms and often made incorrect assumptions about the etymology of certain words; older publications spelled Tok Pisin i as "he" when the word actually originates from English is or a term in an unknown Austronesian language.
For example, a 1953 article in an Australian newspaper quotes a Papua New Guinean man as saying:<blockquote>Before, me fellow school long other fella mission, tasol imi hidim half talk, now Seven Day imi kamapim altogether talk. Me fellow please too much you go along house sick bilong Seven Day now kisim good fellow story now schoolim me fellow. Seven Day Mission something true.</blockquote>
In current Tok Pisin orthography, this paragraph would be spelled as:<blockquote>Bipo, mipela skul long narapela misin, tasol i haitim hap tok, nau Sevin De i kamapim olgeta tok. Mipela plis tumas yu go long haus sik bilong Sevin De nau kisim gutpela stori nau skulim mipela. Sevin De Misin i samting tru.</blockquote>
<blockquote>"In the past, I belonged another church, but it hid parts of the truth; the Seventh Day Adventist church reveals the whole truth. We often go to the Seventh Day Adventist hospital to get good information. The Seventh Day Adventist church is the true church."</blockquote>
Tok Pisin has a smaller number of phonemes than its lexifier language, English. It has around 24 core phonemes: 5 vowels and around 19 consonants. This varies with the local substrate languages and the speaker's level of education. More educated speakers, and/or those where the substrate language(s) have larger phoneme inventories, may have as many as 10 distinct vowels.
Nasal plus plosive offsets lose the plosive element in Tok Pisin; e.g., English hand becomes Tok Pisin . Furthermore, voiced plosives become voiceless at the ends of words, so that English pig is rendered as in Tok Pisin.
Tok Pisin has five pure vowels:
The verb has a suffix, (< Eng. him) to indicate transitivity (, "look"; , "see"). But some verbs, such as "eat", can be transitive without it. Tense is indicated by the separate words (future) (< Eng. by and by) and (past) (< Eng. been). The present progressive tense is indicated by the word ; e.g., "He is eating".
The noun does not indicate number, though pronouns do.
Adjectives usually take the suffix (now often pronounced , though more so for pronouns, and for adjectives; from "fellow") when modifying nouns; an exception is "little". It is also found on numerals and determiners:
Pronouns show person, number, and clusivity. The paradigm varies depending on the local languages; dual number is common, while the trial is less so. The largest Tok Pisin pronoun inventory is:
Reduplication is very common in Tok Pisin. Sometimes it is used as a method of derivation; sometimes words just have it. Some words are distinguished only by reduplication: "ship", "sheep".
There are only two proper prepositions:
Some phrases are used as prepositions, such as ', "in the middle of".
Several of these features derive from the common grammatical norms of Austronesian languages, usually in a simplified form. Other features, such as word order, are closer to English.
Sentences with a 3rd-person subject often put the word immediately before the verb. This may or may not be written separate from the verb, occasionally written as a prefix. Although the word is thought to be derived from "he" or "is", it is not itself a pronoun or a verb but a grammatical marker used in particular constructions, e.g., is "car forbidden here", i.e., "no parking".
The term , derived from English fashion, serves as a nominalizer and collectivizer.
Past tense: marked by (< Eng. been):
Continuative same tense is expressed through: verb + .
Completive or perfective aspect expressed through the word (< Eng. finish):
Transitive words are expressed through (< Eng. him):
Future is expressed through the word "" (< Eng. by and by):
Tok Pisin lacks a passive voice; all verb phrases must have a subject.
Tok Pisin developed out of regional dialects of the local inhabitants' languages and English, brought into the country when English speakers arrived. Four phases in Tok Pisin's development were laid out by Loreto Todd.
Tok Pisin is also known as a "mixed" language. This means that it consists of characteristics of different languages. Tok Pisin obtained most of its vocabulary from English (i.e., English is its lexifier). The origin of the syntax is a matter of debate. Edward Wolfers claimed that the syntax is from the substratum languagesâÂÂthe languages of the local peoples. Derek Bickerton's analysis of creoles, on the other hand, claims that the syntax of creoles is imposed on the grammarless pidgin by its first native speakers: the children who grow up exposed to only a pidgin rather than a more developed language such as one of the local languages or English. In this analysis, the original syntax of creoles is in some sense the default grammar humans are born with.
Pidgins are less elaborated than non-Pidgin languages. Their typical characteristics found in Tok Pisin are:
The use of circumlocutions or periphrases to express complex concepts is a familiar process in pidgin languages. Thus for Tok Pisin, consider ' "food intolerance" (literally "the belly does not like the food"). In other cases, Tok Pisin speakers borrow words from other languages (most often English) to express unfamiliar concepts.
This use of circumlocutions on the one hand, and borrowing of learned English words on the other, has led to less frequently used words often possessing one or two synonyms. The use of English derived terms to replace lengthy circumlocutions has become more common as Tok Pisin speakers are more exposed to English in their daily life.
Several circumlocutions have fallen out of use because they have inaccurate or offensive origins. For example, the older terms and (translating to "bad germ" and "bad disease") for HIV and AIDS have fallen out of use because they falsely imply that all people with the disease engaged in behaviors considered by many Papua New Guineans to be immoral, such as premarital sexual intercourse and drug use. In reality, many people contract HIV prenatally or through faulty blood transfusions.
Two commonly-cited examples of circumlocutions relate to the piano and the helicopter. The following Tok Pisin "names" for the piano, the first four displayed in the older orthography with the current orthography in italicized parentheses and a literal translation in quotes, were recorded by early 20th-century writers:
Linguists observe that these circumlocutions are unstable ad hoc descriptions of an object, rather than set "words" or names. The situation is comparable to a Tok Pisin-English dictionary's definition of a Tok Pisin word with no English equivalent, such as milis being defined as "coconut milk made from shedding coconut meat in the water of a ripe nut"; nobody would suggest that this lengthy expression is the "English name" for this drink.
It is often claimed that mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ (miksmasta bilong Jisas Krais), an adposition translating to Jesus Christ's Mixmaster (the Sunbeam Mixmaster was an electric food processor popular in the United States and Australia), is the Tok Pisin word for "helicopter." This factoid appeared as early as 1965 and still circulates online today. However, the phrase appears to be a fabrication by expatriates working in New Guinea. Linguists point out that helicopters, introduced to New Guinea by oil search teams, would have been far more familiar to early Tok Pisin speakers than electric food processors.
Many words in the Tok Pisin language are derived from English (with Australian influences), indigenous Melanesian languages, and German (part of the country was under German rule until 1919). Some examples:
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Tok Pisin:
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: