Pere Pionnier and Late Nineteenth-Century Bislama

Abstract

Recent years have seen the questioning of a number of widely held views about the early development of Melanesian Pidgin, with some writers debating Mühlhäusler's claim that many of the characteristic features of modern Tok Pisin represent later, twentieth-century, innovations, rather than retentions from what others would argue was a more modern-looking Melanesian Pidgin spoken in the late nineteenth century. This paper argues in support of the contention that many of the lexical and grammatical features that today seem to suggest that Tok Pisin has innovated relatively recently are in fact older retentions, and that these features were recorded in an important grammatical sketch of Bislama published by Père Pionnier in 1913 on the basis of information that he gathered in the 1890s in Vanuatu.