On The Creation And Expansion Of Registers: Sports Reporting In Tok Pisin

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines a case of register creation in Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin/creole spoken in Papua New Guinea, which has come to serve as the most important lingua franca spoken by more than a million people in a highly multilingual society. The register in question is sports reporting, as found in the news paper Wantok. Begun in 1970 and published weekly, it is the country’s most important secular publication and the only newspaper appearing today in Tok Pisin. All of the early written materials in Tok Pisin, which date from the 1920s, and the majority of published works today are religious in nature. Wantok carries most of the features one would expect of a newspaper: world and local news, letters to the editor, and so on. More recently, however, new items have appeared such as sports reports. The emergence of new registers and genres is a manifestation of more general stylistic expansion that has accompanied the nativization of the language over the past few decades. I will look at the language of sports reporting through samples from an early year of Wantok, 1982, and later years, 1987 and 1990 (see the Appendix for two short sample texts). My discussion will focus on the lexical and syntactic features which make this register distinctive. I will also consider the extent to which conventionalization of this register can be detected in the later reports. Finally, I address the question of the extent to which the similarities of sports reporting in English and Tok Pisin are due primarily to the diffusion of conventions for the register across language boundaries, or to more general constraints imposed by the context of situation, subject matter, and so forth.