Growing up with Tok Pisin: Contact, Creolization, and Change in Papua New Guinea's National Language

Abstract

The author, Geoff P. Smith, provides an in-depth analysis of the status and development of Tok Pisin, or Melanesian Pidgin, amongst one group of the population of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Having lived in the country for 22 years, beginning in the early 1970s, he has been exposed to two decades of Tok Pisin, during which time he has noted its development and more common use, especially amongst the young people of PNG. As he rightly states, ‘Tok Pisin is widely used as a lingua franca to communicate across linguistic boundaries’ (p.1). The specific nature of the research, whilst drawing attention to the use of Tok Pisin by ‘people aged from about 10 to late adolescence who spoke Tok Pisin as a first language’ (p.1), is acknowledged as being applicable to only a subsection of the demographic population, and therefore not easily representative of the total population. Given the rapid changes which have occurred in PNG since independence in 1975, the subject group has been exposed to a plethora of different influences. In a country which is known as ‘the land of the unexpected’, and in a time of political, educational, social and cultural change, it is difficult and dangerous to generalise regarding any trends. My exposure to Melanesian Pidgin in various parts of PNG over the last ten years has taught me to appreciate the fact that it can be spoken in different ways in different places, as it is primarily an oral language. According to the Ethnologue (Grimes 2000), PNG has over 800 language groups, and ‘the language distribution in PNG is the most complex in the world’ (Dorney 2000, 20). Moreover, illiteracy is high, a factor which further complicates attempts to standardise Tok Pisin: