Tok Pisin


Tok Pisin is a 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. However, in parts of Western, Gulf, Central, Oro Province and Milne Bay Provinces, the use of Tok Pisin has a shorter history, and is less universal, especially among older people. While it likely developed as a trade pidgin, Tok Pisin has become a distinct language in its own right. It is often referred to by Anglophones as "New Guinea Pidgin" or "Pidgin English".
Between five and six million people use Tok Pisin to some degree, although not all speak it well. Many now learn it as a first language, in particular the children of parents or grandparents who originally spoke different vernaculars. 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 language, after Tok Pisin. Perhaps one million people now use Tok Pisin as a primary language. Tok Pisin is "slowly crowding out" other languages of Papua New Guinea.

Name

Tok is derived from English "talk", but has a wider application, also meaning "word", "speech", or "language". Pisin derives from the English word pidgin; the latter, in turn, may originate in the word business, which is descriptive of the typical development and use of pidgins as inter-ethnic trade languages.
While Tok Pisin's name in the language is Tok Pisin, it is also called New Guinea Pidgin in English. Papua New Guinean anglophones almost invariably refer to Tok Pisin as "Pidgin" when speaking English. However, professional linguists prefer to use the term Tok Pisin, as this is considered a distinct language in its own right. The language can no longer be considered a pidgin strictly speaking: it is now a first language for numerous people not simply a lingua franca to facilitate communication with speakers of other languages, and as such is more rightly called a creole.

Classification

The Tok Pisin language is a result of Pacific Islanders intermixing, when people speaking numerous different languages were sent to work on plantations in Queensland and various islands. The labourers began to develop a pidgin, drawing vocabulary primarily from English, but also from German, Malay, Portuguese and their own Austronesian languages.
This English-based pidgin evolved into Tok Pisin in German New Guinea. It became a widely used lingua franca – and language of interaction between rulers and ruled, and among the ruled themselves who did not share a common vernacular. 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 is to be contrasted with Hiri Motu, the lingua franca of Papua, which was derived not from English but from Motu, the vernacular of the indigenous people of the Port Moresby area.

Official status

Along with English and Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin is one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea. 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.

Regional variations

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.

Alphabet

The Tok Pisin alphabet contains 22 letters, five of which are vowels, and four digraphs. The letters are :
The four digraphs note diphthongs, as well as certain consonants:

Phonology

Tok Pisin, like many pidgins and creoles, has a simpler phonology than the superstrate language. It has 17 consonants and 5 vowels. However, this varies with the local substrate languages and the level of education of the speaker. The following is the "core" phonemic inventory, common to virtually all varieties of Tok Pisin. More educated speakers, and/or those where the substrate language 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 han. Furthermore, voiced plosives become voiceless at the ends of words, so that English pig is rendered as pik in Tok Pisin.

Consonants

Tok Pisin has five vowels, similar to the vowels of Spanish, Japanese, and many other five-vowel languages:

Grammar

The verb has a suffix, -im to indicate transitivity. But some verbs, such as kaikai "eat", can be transitive without it. Tense is indicated by the separate words bai and bin . The present progressive tense is indicated by the word stap – e.g. "eating" is kaikai stap.
The noun does not indicate number, though pronouns do.
Adjectives usually take the suffix -pela when modifying nouns; an exception is liklik "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,
SingularDualTrialPlural
1st exclusivemi

from "me"		mitupela

from "me two fellow"		mitripela

from "me three fellow"		mipela

from "me fellow"
1st inclusive –yumitupela

from "you me two fellow"		yumitripela

from "you me three fellow"		yumipela or yumi

from "you me fellow"
2ndyu

from "you"		yutupela

from "you two fellow"		yutripela

from "you three fellow"		yupela

from "you fellow"
3rdem

from "him"		tupela

from "two fellow"		tripela

from "three fellow"		ol

from "all"

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: sip "ship", sipsip "sheep".
There are only two proper prepositions: bilong, which means "of" or "for", and long, which means everything else.
Tok Pisin: "Mipela i bin go long blekmaket". → English: "We went to the black market".
Tok Pisin: "Ki bilong yu" → English: "your key"
Tok Pisin: "Ol bilong Godons". → English: "They are from Gordon's"..
Some phrases are used as prepositions, such as long namel , "in the middle of".
Several of these features derive from the common grammatical norms of Austronesian languages – although usually in a simplified form. Other features, such as word order, are however closer to English.
Sentences which have a 3rd person subject often put the word i just 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., "Kar i tambu long hia" is "car forbidden here", i.e., "no parking".

Tense and aspect

Past tense: marked by "bin" :
Tok Pisin: "Na praim minista i bin tok olsem".
English: "And the prime minister spoke thus".
Continuative same tense is expressed through: verb + "i stap".
Tok Pisin: "Em i slip i stap".
English: "He/She is sleeping".
Completive or perfective aspect expressed through the word "pinis" :
Tok Pisin: "Em i lusim bot pinis".
English: "He had got out of the boat"..
Transitive words are expressed through "-im" :
Tok Pisin: "Yu pinisim stori nau."
English: "Finish your story now!"..
Future is expressed through the word "bai" :
Tok Pisin: "Em bai ol i go long rum"
English: "They will go to their rooms now..

Development of Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin is a language that developed out of regional dialects of the languages of the local inhabitants and English, brought into the country when English speakers arrived. There were four phases in the development of Tok Pisin that were laid out by Loreto Todd.
  1. Casual contact between English speakers and local people developed a marginal pidgin
  2. Pidgin English was used between the local people. The language expanded from the users' mother tongue
  3. As the interracial contact increased, the vocabulary expanded according to the dominant language.
  4. In areas where English was the official language a depidginization occurred
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 the English language, i.e., English is its lexifier. The origin of the syntax is a matter of debate. Hymes claims that the syntax is from the substratum languages, i.e., the 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:
  1. A smaller vocabulary which leads to metaphors to supply lexical units:
  2. *Smaller vocabulary:
  3. *:Tok Pisin: "vot"; English: "election" and "vote"
  4. *:Tok Pisin: "hevi"; English: "heavy" and "weight"
  5. *Metaphors:
  6. *:Tok Pisin: "skru bilong han" ; English: "elbow"
  7. *:Tok Pisin: "skru bilong lek" ; English: "knee".
  8. *:Tok Pisin: "gras bilong het" ; English: "hair" .
  9. *Periphrases:
  10. *:Tok Pisin: "nambawan pikinini bilong misis kwin" ; English: Prince Charles.
  11. A reduced grammar: lack of copula, determiners; reduced set of prepositions, and conjunctions
  12. Less differentiated phonology: and are not distinguished in Tok Pisin. The sibilants,,,,, and are also not distinguished.
  13. :All of the English words "fish", "peach", "feast" or "peace" would have been realised in Tok Pisin as pis. In fact the Tok Pisin pis means "fish". English "piss" was reduplicated to keep it distinct: thus pispis means "urine" or "to urinate".
  14. :Likewise, sip in Tok Pisin could have represented English "ship", "jib", "jeep", "sieve" or "chief". In fact it means "ship".

    Vocabulary

Many words in the Tok Pisin language are derived from English, indigenous Melanesian languages and German.