Tok Pisin

Where Tok Pisin came from

Labourers taken from many language groups to plantations in Queensland and on Pacific islands built a pidgin from English, German, Malay, Portuguese and their own Austronesian languages, perhaps above all Kuanua, the language of the Tolai of East New Britain. It became Tok Pisin in German New Guinea, where German was the colonial language and yet the English-based pidgin became the common tongue. Papua to the south took Hiri Motu instead, and Tok Pisin has since overtaken it in the towns.

Bislama in Vanuatu and Pijin in the Solomon Islands developed in parallel, and the three have been treated as varieties of one Melanesian Pidgin. Small differences separate them: "of" is bilong in Tok Pisin and blong in the other two, and the adjective ending is -pela against -fala.

How the grammar works

Verbs take -im to become transitive, so luk is "look" and lukim "see". Tense is marked by separate words: bin, from been, for the past, bai, from by and by, for the future, and stap for an action in progress. Nouns do not show number. Adjectives, numerals and determiners take -pela, as in wanpela, "one", and dispela boi. Reduplication can make a new word: sip is a ship and sipsip a sheep. Only bilong and long are true prepositions.

Why the colonial spelling was replaced

Colonial administrators spelled each word after the language it came from, which gave no fixed forms and wrong guesses, such as "he" for the marker i. The colonial Department of Education created the present orthography in 1955 to raise literacy. It has 21 letters and four digraphs, among them ng. A 1953 newspaper quotation begins "Before, me fellow school long other fella mission"; in today's spelling that is "Bipo, mipela skul long narapela misin".

Most government documents are in English, but public information campaigns often run in Tok Pisin, and some schools use it for the first three years of elementary education. In the 2011 census 68.4% of the population was literate in Tok Pisin.