Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Pidgins and Creoles 233
(1) Woman ia bae i kilim ol pig long garen blong hem.
woman this fut srp hit pl pig in garden poss 3sg.
‘This woman will attack the pigs in her garden’.
All the words in this sentence are derived from the lexifi er, English, but
most with different meanings or functions. For example kilim is based on
kill him, but here it means ‘hit’ or ‘strike’; long is a general preposition
derived from along; and hem, from him, is used for he, she, it, him and her.
The word bae (from by and by) indicates future, and blong (from belong) is
used to show possession. The way the words are put together refl ects the
rules of the substrate languages, the Eastern Oceanic languages of the
southwestern Pacifi c. For example the word ia (derived from here) means
‘this’, but it follows the noun woman rather than preceding it as this does
in English. Also, the small particle i (from he) is required before the verb to
indicate that the subject (this woman) is singular. And the word ol (derived
from all) precedes the noun pig to indicate plural rather than a following -s
as in English pigs.
Contact languages such as Melanesian Pidgin begin to emerge when
people speaking different languages fi rst develop their own individual
ways of communicating, often by using words and phrases they have
learned from other languages (most often from the lexifi er) that they
think others might be familiar with, but leaving out words such as prepositions.
The combination of these individualized ways of communicating
is called a ‘jargon’ or ‘pre-pidgin’. Here are two examples from the early
‘South Seas Jargon’, which fi rst emerged from contact between Pacifi c
Islanders and Europeans in the early 1800s (from Clark, 1979: 30; Keesing,
1988: 43):
(2) a. Go my house; me got plenty fruit my house. (Rarotonga – 1860)
b. He too much bad man. (Kosrae – 1860)
If the different language groups remain in contact, or if several groups
start to use the pre-pidgin as a lingua franca (i.e. a common language),
certain communicative conventions may develop, resulting in a new language,
called a pidgin. In the Pacifi c, this occurred after 1863 when
islanders from diverse regions were recruited to work on plantations in
Queensland and other areas. A stable pidgin emerged, using some features
from the pre-pidgin more consistently, while dropping others – for
example (from Keesing, 1988: 42–43):
(3) a. Me want to go along big fellow house . . . (Queensland – 1870s)
b. big wind broke ship belonga me. (Efate [New Hebrides] – 1878)
c. man here no good . . . (Tanna [New Hebrides] – 1877)