The origins of Tok Pisin

As Crowley (this volume) points out, the early history of an English-based contact language in the Pacific goes back to the time of early trading activities in the newly opened-up European colonies in Australia. A New South Wales pidgin English had already come into existence as a means of communication between settlers and Aboriginal people, and some features of this were to appear in the early Pacific pidgin. Indeed, some elements, such as pikinini ‘child’ and save ‘know’ based on the Portuguese pequeño and sabir respectively, may have had a considerably longer history in maritime contact. Whaling expeditions out of Sydney probably proceeded from the late 18^th century, but successive interest in sandalwood and trepang (sea slug or bêche de mer) in the mid-19^th century in the south-west and central Pacific saw a great increase in commerce and communication that favored the formation of a stable Pacific Pidgin English. At first, ships’ crews of mixed origin and shore-bound trading posts provided areas of contact, but later, large-scale population movements took place as Melanesian laborers were recruited to work on plantations in Queensland and the Pacific.

While the origins of Tok Pisin are firmly rooted in this Pacific Pidgin English, its development is somewhat different from its sister dialects. Melanesian laborers from New Britain and mainland New Guinea entered the labor trade somewhat later than those from the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands and were not involved in the Queensland plantations to the same extent, so the development of Tok Pisin proceeded along its own path. Critical in this development was the role of Germany in colonizing the area. German New Guinea, or what is now the northern half of the Papua New Guinea mainland and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, became effectively cut off from neighboring regions. Laborers from this area did enter the plantation economy, thus promoting conditions conducive to the stabilization of the pidgin, but this took place mainly in Samoa in the Central Pacific. Laborers were drawn mainly from the New Guinea Islands region, although some may have been drawn from the north coast regions of the mainland as well. Since the area typically has large numbers of languages spoken by small populations, the need for a lingua franca on the plantations favored the development of the already existing pidgin language. There may well have been some mutual influence between this variety and the Queensland “Canefield English” used by other Melanesians, but the extent of this is difficult to determine.