Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin is one of the most important languages of Melanesia and is an official language of Papua New Guinea beside English and Hiri Motu (Mühlhäusler 2003). As Mühlhäusler notes the name “Ton Pisin” (“talk pidgin”) became the official name of the language since independence in 1981. Until then it has several names such as “Neomelanesian”, “Melanesian Pidgin”, “New Guinea Pidgin”, “Talk Vaitman”, “Tok Boi”. In his opinion, the continual renaming of the language occurs not by accident: “it reflects the fact that in the past expatriates played a leading part as model speakers, to be followed by Black plantation workers and then finally by the entire population” (Mühlhäusler 2003:2). A name such as “New Guinea Pidgin” is found by him therefore most suitable for determination of the various developmental stages of the language. For the present–day language the name “Tok Pisin” suits better though (Mühlhäusler 2003: 2–3).

Tok Pisin is spoken almost in all parts of Papua New Guinea, especially in those of them which one belonged to German New Guinea. More than half of the population has Tok Pisin as second language while it became the first language for a noticeably increasing number of town-inmates: so in the sector of Papua belonged to Australian, the native language Pidgin Motu (Hiri Motu) has been replaced by Tok Pisin, notes Mühlhäusler (2003). In his view some scientists falsely consider Tok Pisin “as a regional dialect of Melanesian Pidgin English, other varieties of which are Solomon Islands Pidgin English, Bislama of Vanuatu, the almost extinct Pidgin English of New Caledonia, Kanaka English of Queensland, and a few other marginal pidgin languages”. He claims that the term “dialect” does not suit in this case, because the historical relationships between the languages are more complicated to be suggested with it (Mühlhäusler 2003).

The history of Tok Pisin’s development counts already more than hundred years, when the strongly reducing English jargons were brought to the eastern Bismarck Archipelago in about 1850 by whale hunters and traders. Mühlhäusler emphasizes an important moment which played considerable role in pidgins forming – it was “the recruitment of thousands of Bismarck Islanders to the German plantations of Samoa, which began in approximately 1878”. In this period this pidgin goes through consequential stages: it extends and became modified by the people from New Guinea (blakbois) who took it back to New Guinea after their long-term work had expired. In this development the plantations were as the stabilizing factor for the unstable jargon English varieties by forming a standardized lingua franca. For the Tok Pisin study it is important that the owners of and colonial masters were Germans, which leads Mühlhäusler to the conclusion, that English language was not available as a model. The consequence was that Tok Pisin developed its own internal mechanisms of enlarging its vocabulary at an early stage (Mühlhäusler 2003).

Over the years, the linguistic situation has been changing, having the influence from different languages. To make the above mentioned facts logical we will turn to the order of the historical events occurred. In 1884 Papua New Guinea was divided into two parts: the north-eastern, which was possessed by the Bismarck Archipelago and south-eastern taken by the British. British New Guinea belonged to Australian Territory of Papua by the Papua Act adopted in 1906. Australians who administered German New Guinea as a mandate of the League of Nations annexed it after World War I, while Papua in spite of it had a separate political entity. Further, the differences became strongly when gold and mining played an important role in 1930s in New Guinea on the one hand, and they never had such importance in Papua on the other, until the end of World War II when the administrative union of Papua and New Guinea was established. However, even after that the both of territories had the special status until the independence of Papua New Guinea 1975 (Wurm 1979:208).

Some authorities refer the development of Tok Pisin into a stable lingua franca to the part of Japanese invasion in the Second World War. In opposite, Mühlhäusler defines the negative consequences for Tok Pisin:

1. “The distraction of almost all the plantations and missionary stations eliminated the most important social context for learning and developing the language at a stroke. An entire generation of young people acquired only inadequate knowledge of Tok Pisin.

2. Speakers of Tok Pisin were brought into contact with speakers of the far more anglicised Papuan Pidgin English and the broken Foreigner Talk of the Australian and American soldiers.

3. The German missionaries’ work of codifying and standardizing was interrupted” (Mühlhäusler 2003: 6-7).

But beside the negative consequences the war also had some positive, notes Mühlhäusler: “Tok Pisin was the language in which the Allies communicated (over radio and in millions of leaflets): its status changed from that of a language of workers and servants to a medium of liberation and self-assertion”.

Concluding the historical results of Tok Pisin development Mühlhäusler gives attention to the role of the German element in the lexicon of the language has severely reduced (Mühlhäusler 2003:7).

Today, as the most widespread variety of Tok Pisin functions the rural variety, accepted as a standard for Tok Pisin publications such as Wantok, the newspaper written in Tok Pisin. Hirano (2001) regards it as the most stable of the varieties “because it is the major means of communication for speakers of widely divergent language backgrounds” (Hirano 2001: 102). It is clear from the Table 1 that the percent of Tok Pisin usage is rapidly increasing:

Source	Laycock 1985	Laycock 1985	Laycock 1985	Romaine 1992	Romaine 1992	Report 1994	Report 2002
Year	1966	(Literacy) 1966	1971	1980	(Literacy) 1980	(Literacy) 1990	(Literacy) 2000
English	13.27%	11.41%	20.37%	22.34%	20.17%	29.1%	39.2%
Tok Pisin	36.5%	12.23%	44.49%	45%	20.2%	30.7%	43.9%
Motu	8.14%	3.38%	9.48%	9.4%	4.5%	6%	4.9%
Other		15.93%			14.23%	38.5%	40.5%

Table 1. Comparing reported census speaking/literacy percentages for different languages (Paliwala, 2012)

Nevertheless, despite the usage of Tok Pisin as a language of government it has little furthered in the direction of stabilisation: as Mühlhäusler notes “there is no standard policy on language, and the status of Tok Pisin as compared with other official languages remains unclarified” (Mühlhäusler 2003: 8).