With its English base, Tok Pisin has served as a unifier for the people of Papua New Guinea, a country home to more indigenous languages than any other place on Earth. Tok Pisin’s most notable trait is it use of only two prepositions: blong (sometimes shown as bilong), meaning of or for, and long, used for all other prepositions.
#Papua new guinea official languages hiri motu full
In this case, Tok Pisin is the creole Hiri Motu is the pidgin.Īs you may have guessed, the name ‘Tok Pisin’ literally derives from the English words talk and pidgin, although it has long graduated from pidgin status to that of a full creole nevertheless, most speakers of Tok Pisin will simply refer to the language as ‘Pidgin’ when speaking in English.Ĩ0 percent of the lexicon is derived from English, but the syntax used is Austronesian. Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu: Papua New Guinea is unique in that not only does a creole language share full official language status, but a pidgin language shares that status as well. In a select few countries, creoles have evolved to the point where they have become a primary means of communication not just for private citizens but have achieved the status of being official languages of government. In cases where use of these pidgins became widespread, many of these pidgins eventually developed into full fledged creoles, fusing traits of their parent languages into new stable, regularised languages that became adopted as mother tongues by large groups of people.
WHEN PEOPLE WHO DON’T SHARE A COMMON LANGUAGE begin interacting with one another, often a pidgin language develops between them: an impromptu, simplified language using basic words derived from their respective native languages.Īs European colonial empires spread throughout the world over the past 500-plus years, the number of pidgin languages around the world exploded.
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