Onto the final language of this trip around the world, we head to Papua New Guinea (PNG) to cover one of its many languages. Tok Pisin connects people across cultures in the most linguistically diverse country on Earth.

The basics

Tok Pisin is an English-based creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea, predominantly as a second-language (L2) lingua franca. The language has about 100,000 native speakers, but it is spoken non-natively by about 40% of the nation’s 11 million inhabitants. It is often difficult to get an exact picture of PNG’s demographics due to the overwhelming diversity of the country, so these figures should be taken with a Pacific Ocean’s worth of salt.

The language is but one of three lingua francas operating in the nation, with English being spoken by a third of the population and the native lingua franca of Hiri Motu being spoken in areas around the capital. There is a vast amount to say about how the lingua francas of PNG interact with each other and the approximately 840 first (L1) languages on the island, so this article will have to skim around the edge of that topic.

Clusivity in an Anglic language

Clusivity is a grammatical concept that does not appear in any European language. It essentially refers to a distinction between “us—including you” and “us—but not you”. Clusivity is quite a common feature globally, It appears in nearly all Austronesian languages, many native American languages, and some of the eastern Indo-European languages.

Clusivity is, in fact, relatively rare in Papuan languages, so it is interesting to see its presence in Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin received large amounts of Melanesian influence in its formation years, so the language’s first speakers had the concept of clusivity and wanted to be able to express this in their new-found lingua franca.

The way Tok Pisin handles clusivity is rather elegant. The language uses a singular-dual-trial-plural system, meaning it distinguishes between having 1, 2, 3, or more of something. Tok Pisin uses the third-person pronouns of tupela—“two fellow”—and tripela—“three fellow”—as the bases for all of its dual and trial plurals. To turn these into first person exclusive pronouns, you add a mi—“me”—at the front, so mitupela means “me and someone else, but not you”. Finally, to include the listener, you add yu—“you”— to end up with yumitupela, “you and me”.

This system is quite distinct from the way that most Melanesian languages build their pronouns, generally preferring to take small elements and unique roots rather than “agglutinating through the pain”. This is not to say that the Melanesian languages don’t agglutinate, they do, but building a new pronoun system from the ground up in a non-native language can often result in relying on fewer roots to be understood.

Structure and vocabulary

Tok Pisin derives huge swathes of its vocabulary from English, but the order that speakers choose to arrange those concepts in leans strongly Austronesian. The language has a complex verb system, with continuosity, completeness, transitivity and tense being conveyed by a series of affixes and particles.

Tok Pisin is also widely studied for its use of circumlocution, literally “speaking around (a topic)”, whereby speakers will create lengthy descriptors to explain a topic rather than coin a new word directly for it. There exists the infamous bikpela bokis bilong krai taim you paitim na kikim em—“big fellow box that cries when you hit and kick it”—referring to the piano (Bálint, 1969, cited by Romaine, 1988); coining vocabulary can be difficult across cultural boundaries, and in a decentralised language like Tok Pisin, it can be easier to explain an object than name it.

These systems rose in parallel with a decrease in complexity of copula-structure, prepositions, and conjunctions, that creates an almost unique divide for a creole – it is far easier to say when something happened than where it happened or describing what it happened to. A lot of linguistic precision is spent on temporal resolution, and not much is spent on vocabulary.

What is a lingua franca, really?

This circuit of the Language of the Week series (there’ll be more, don’t worry) has primarily focussed on the intersection of language and multiculturalism. The term that has kept cropping up in the last few articles has been “lingua franca”, so allow us to briefly discuss what the term actually means in a bit more detail.

In brief, as has been said before in this series, a lingua franca is a language used by people who do not share a common native language. This role is served throughout the world by many languages, most of them remnants of historic empires or trade networks. For example, the lingua franca on most of the Internet is English – the USA’s global hegemony combined with the Anglo-and-Eurosphere’s influence in the foundation of the Internet means that a lot of interactions take place online in English, even when no-one involved speaks it natively.

It is, however, important to note that English is not the only lingua franca, as some are inclined to believe. French is used throughout much of Africa, Modern Standard Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa, Spanish throughout the Americas, and many local lingua francas exist within individual countries or regions. When I call Tok Pisin a lingua franca, what I mean is that it connects people who otherwise would not be connected. Tok Pisin is barely spoken as a native language, its non-native speakers outnumber natives 40:1, and yet Tok Pisin has become a symbol of a sort of shared New-Guinean identity that did not exist before.

The use of a local English-based lingua franca instead of English is globally unusual. A lot of previously Pidgin-speaking places have been “de-pidginised” as a result of continued Anglophone cultural dominance, so Tok Pisin maintaining its status is rather unique. There are very few other creoles that have stood the test of time: Jamaican Patois, Nigerian Pidgin, and Sranan Tongo to list three, and these tended to persist as a sign of resistance and of reclamation of identity. Tok Pisin’s existence is, despite the language’s history, relatively less politicised than other English creoles, and it has persisted through simply being the lingua franca.

In a country like Papua New Guinea, where so many different native languages are all being spoken simultaneously, a lingua franca is a necessity, and one that evolves to meet its speakers where they’re at is vastly more important than maintaining intelligibility to outsiders. There has therefore been far less pressure on PNG to de-pidginise. The process has still happened in some areas, as about a third of the population now speaks English, although this is often in addition to rather than instead of the pidgin.

Conclusion

Tok Pisin is a fascinating language with a lot more to be said about it. I highly recommend doing some further reading into the language and into Papua New Guinea more broadly – it’s a highly underrated country with so much to learn.

In regards to Language of the Week, it will be back next week as normal, with us returning to my home of Europe to start another world tour.