Bislama

How plantation labour produced Bislama

During the blackbirding of the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Pacific islanders, many from the New Hebrides that are now Vanuatu, were taken as indentured labourers, often kidnapped, to plantations mainly in Queensland and Fiji. Workers speaking many languages formed a pidgin of English words on regional grammar. That plantation pidgin is the source of Bislama, of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and of Pijin in the Solomon Islands.

Returning labourers carried it home at the turn of the 20th century. One count gives Vanuatu 113 languages, and Bislama became the lingua franca between ni-Vanuatu and with foreigners. Robert Louis Stevenson, travelling in 1888 and 1889, recorded the name Beach-la-Mar. Schools still teach in English and French, and the Bislama article notes scholarly concern that the creole is weakening Vanuatu's indigenous languages.

What long and blong do in a sentence

Two small words replace most English or French prepositions. Long covers next to, at, to and in: stoa long haos is the store next to the house, jea long haos the chair in the house. Blong, from English belong, does the work of of: buk blong mi is my book, man blong Amerika a man from America.

Why Bislama spelling settled late

For most of its history Bislama was spoken and rarely written. The first dictionary appeared in 1977, and a new one in 1995, with a second edition in 2004, fixed a uniform spelling: AE and AO replaced the older AI and AU, and a tilde now marks the labialised M̃ and P̃. On Pentecost Island some people write Bislama in avoiuli, a script whose letters derive from sand drawing and which has signs for goods such as pig tusks. Pronunciation still varies by island, so the future marker is bambae, mbae, nambae or bae.