Tok Pisin
Welkam! "welcome"
Welkam! "welcome"
Introduction
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Tok Pisin (from tok "talk" + pisin "pidgin") is an English-based creole spoken by 121,000 people as a first language and by 4 million people as a second language primarily in the northern part of Papua New Guinea (PNG), or Niugini in Tok Pisin. It is also known as Pisin, Pidgin, Neomelanesian, New Guinea Pidgin English, and Melanesian English.
The constitution of PNG recognizes Tok Pisin as one of the national languages of the country. Although English is more widely used for official business, much of the debate in Parliament is in Tok Pisin. It serves as a lingua franca for speakers of PNG's 800 different languages. It is the first language of some 121,000 people residing in mixed urban areas who pass it on to their children, and the second language of over 4 million people country-wide. Although many people feel that Tok Pisin is inferior to English, most accept it as a separate language, important for PNG's identity. Until recently, English was the official language of education in PNG, although Tok Pisin was widely used in community and church-run pre-schools and vocational schools. However, with the recent education reform, communities can choose the language to be used in the first three years of elementary education, and many have chosen Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin is also used in Radio Australia's Tok Pisin broadcasts. The weekly Tok Pisin newspaper Wantok has a readership of over 10,000, and many government publications are also in Tok Pisin. The language is widely used in religious services.
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When laborers from the Pacific islands who spoke many different languages were shipped off to work on sugar plantations in Queensland, Australia, they did not have a common language. As a result, they developed an English-based pidgin which also borrowed words from Portuguese and German, as well as from the Austronesian languages spoken by the laborers. When the plantation workers returned to their own islands, they brought the new pidgin with them. It became known as Tok Pisin in New Guinea, Bislama in Vanuatu, and Pijin in the Solomon Islands.
Structure
Sound System
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Tok Pisin has fewer phonemes than English. Vowels Consonants When English words are borrowed into Tok Pisin, consonants are often dropped, especially at the end of words, e.g., English pepper becomes pepa.
Click here to listen to Radio Australia Tok Pisin broadcasts. |
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Grammar Nouns Adjectives Pronouns
Verbs
Prepositions
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Most of the vocabulary of Tok Pisin comes from English. The borrowed words sometimes have a different meaning, e.g., baksait means "back." Many words have a wider range of meanings in Tok Pisin than they do in English, for instance gras means "grass, hair, fur, feathers," kukim means "cook, burn." Below is a list of Tok Pisin words that come from languages other than English:
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Writing |
To give you a flavor of reading in Tok Pisin, here is an excerpt from a Tok Pisin folk story from a series called "Wan Tausen Wan Nait bilong Papua New Guinea" that was published in Wantok, April 6, 1985 and its English translation.
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Resources
Copyright 2007 © National Virtual Translation Center