Abstract
English is widely used as a Second Language. Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the 1990s (during my residence) had a population of approximately 4 million people who used slightly more than 800 languages. Many PNG people, through exogamy, have both a mother and a father language; they use Tok Pisin (a major dialect of Neo-Melanesian Creole English) for everyday communication outside their neighbourhood group; and they use English officially and for schooling. They are expert multilinguals. India is a vast, multilingual country with 427 languages, with English used officially and for education, and it is geographically remote from PNG. Both peoples were found to simplify English in similar ways, as an aid to learning the language, specifically by these means: - rule-generalization (disregarding exceptions)- giving a regular semantic basis to the prepositions (in, into, for, on, etc.),which have a basis in regularity with reference to location, direction and time, but are, overall, highly irregular in Standard English (SE)- reducing the system of article determiners (the, a, zero) to the zero option- exploiting the use of two-word verb+preposition and verb+noun combinations like play up, play down, and do banking, do repairs, make_progress.This congruence implies systematic processes and a universal basis, suggesting that other learners could profit from this approach, with the further implication that this type of English is a true interlanguage.
Highlights
1.1 Facts of Language According to theEthnologue, there are slightly more than 7,000 languages in the world
Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the 1990s had a population of approximately 4 million people who used slightly more than 800 languages
We have identified a Second language English which is used by two disparate and geographically separated populations, and which expresses a range of forms of increasing complexity, from the simplest and most regular to the equivalent of the First-language (L1) speaker variety
Summary
Ethnologue, there are slightly more than 7,000 languages in the world. Language is an attribute of the human brain, but it is not part of us in the same way that body parts, for example, are part of us. A significant, recent (2001), constructed language is Toki Pona (see Lang, 2014), which is noted for its small vocabulary (123 words), simple structure and ease of acquisition (30 hours, suggested). It was developed for philosophical and artistic purposes, but it demonstrates how language could have developed, based on simplicity (only 14 distinct sounds) and a large amount of ambiguity or polysemy, with reliance on immediate context to specify actual meaning. English marks the subject of transitive and intransitive verbs with the same Nominative marker, whereas Hindi uses a different marker for each, and the transitive marker is called Ergative (“doing”). English uses pre-positions (in, into, of, on, to), which precede the noun or noun-phrase which they qualify, while Hindi expresses the same ideas with post-positions, which follow their noun or noun-phrase
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