Tok Pisin

Or “talk business”, that is.

The Queen’s English, General American and the various Commonwealth Englishes, along with Hiberno-English, are all dialects of English itself. All of these taken together constitute a single language in the Ingvaeonic subgroup of West Germanic, except that there’s a minority opinion that English is a Scandinavian language. This has something to recommend it. For instance, English uses “they” as a third person pronoun, apparently inherited from Danish and its syntax, at least as it is today, is unlike (other?) West Germanic languages as it sticks all its verbs in the middle of the clause. However, it also tends to have unusually Nordic words peppered about in it which are apparently not the result of loanwords, such as the word “from”, whereto similar words are found in Scandinavian languages but not Western Germanic. It is certainly true that English was influenced by the existence of the Danelaw and since modern English is descended from East Midlands English, where the Danelaw was, it’s probably even more Scandinavian, but informed opinion is on the side of English being an Ingvaeonic West Germanic language.

It could be said that the other Ingvaeonic languages are all spoken in Europe as well. They would normally include West, North and East Frisian, English, Scots, Yola and possibly Shelta. Of these, the Frisian languages, supposèdly the closest continental languages to English, are disappointingly distant, partly due to Dutch influence. Although I can understand North Frisian fairly well, it’s probably more down to the influence of Low German than its similarity to English. Shelta is meant to be impenetrable by its very design, so it’s a mix of Irish and English so far as I can tell and nobody outside the community is likely to be able to follow it easily. It’s probably also worth mentioning Romani here, which tends to bend itself according to the grammar and phonology of the speakers around it, so I’d guess that it too comes across as a fairly impenetrable mix. Since there were Roma living locally and attending my primary school though, I’ve been aware of it from an early age and it’s hard to know how it sounds to a monoglot English speaker. Then there’s Scots, which I’ve devoted an entire post to. The thing about Scots is that because English English speakers tend to live in an environment where the only widely-spoken languages are English plus a number of very different minority languages such as Urdu, we don’t appreciate that the languages we’re happy to accept as separate from outside this country such as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are actually more similar to each other than the Queen’s English is to Scots, and with Scots there’s also a register issue, where it blurs into Scottish English. That leaves Yola, which was spoken in County Wexford and is extinct, whose written form is apparently easier for an English reader to follow than the spoken language. It’s notably similar to English, but can’t be understood straightforwardly. There is one further language in this group, Fingalian, spoken unsurprisingly in Fingal, about which I’m afraid I don’t know much.

Those, then, are the European Ingvaeonic languages. However, there is considerable racism surrounding the other offshoots of English spoken in other parts of the world, notably Bislama and of course Tok Pisin. These are referred to inaccurately as “Pidgin English”, because a pidgin is an improvised speech used between people who don’t have a common language. Tok Pisin and Bislama are creoles: languages which were formerly pidgins later learnt as first languages. It’s actually very likely that English itself is a creole of Danish and Anglo-Saxon, that is, that it was spoken originally between the Angles of the Danelaw and the Danish settlers, speaking Old Norse, who found that their languages were almost but not quite close enough for them to understand each other and had to improvise. Therefore we can’t look down our noses in a linguistically purist manner at the Papuans and the people of Vanu Atu and say that’s not a proper language but just a mish-mash, because our own language is exactly that several times over.

It should also be mentioned that although I’ve singled out Tok Pisin and Bislama, there are a number of other English-based creoles spoken elsewhere, such as in Nigeria and several different forms in the Caribbean, Cameroun, Pitcairn, Singapore and Malaysia, and these may have fewer users than Tok Pisin and Bislama but are still important. I just don’t want to get too bogged down.

I don’t know how well the actor Ken Campbell is. He appeared in the radio version of the second series of ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’ and one episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’. The reason he crops up here is that he was part of a campaign to get Bislama adopted as an international auxiliary language like Esperanto. This has a kind of logic to it because the grammar and phonology of most creoles, including Bislama, is simplified through their mode of evolution, and it would therefore be relatively easy for many people to learn and use. Campbell actually translated ‘Macbeth’ into Bislama. Unsurprisingly, his plan was unsuccessful but unfortunately the reason for that is very probably that it isn’t taken seriously as a language. A lot of humour has been based on the use of Tok Pisin and Bislama, particularly the latter, and whereas linguistic humour is fine, I can’t help feeling that there’s more than a hint of racism in this particular instance.

Bislama has ten thousand native speakers plus 200 000 who speak it as a second language. For some reason I don’t understand, it’s named after the French word for sea cucumber, bêche–de–mer, which is used as another name for it. Because the name has “Islam” in it, I think it gives one the impression that it’s going to be a Semitic language like Arabic, which it absolutely is not. It’s spoken in Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, an archipelago northwest of Australia which became independent in 1980 (on my thirteenth birthday in fact), and is its national language, whereas French and English are also official languages there. Vanuatu holds the record for having the highest number of languages spoken per capita in the world. With a population of only 300 000, a hundred and thirty-eight languages are spoken on it. Bislama is used mainly in urban areas, and as an auxiliary language all over the nation, and is impinging on other languages there, apparently even including English and French. There’s a map of the languages here.

Bislama arose when in the nineteenth century, people in the New Hebrides were kidnapped and enslaved in Queensland, and yes, this was decades after slavery had supposèdly been abolished in the British Empire. Since Papuans also suffered in this way, the two languages are quite close to each other. Bislama illustrates how creoles are not always simpler than their parent languages in its pronouns, as it has dual and trial numbers across the board whereas English even lost its dual first person pronouns in the eleventh century. It also has inclusive and exclusive versions of the first person non-singular pronouns, which is a serious lack in English and most other Indo-European tongues.

Tok Pisin is a more widely-spoken language, with over a hundred thousand first language speakers and four million people speaking it as a second language. It’s native to Papua, the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Linguistically, Papua is a quite remarkable place. Characterised geographically by valleys separated by high mountains, it has tended to isolate its human populations from each other since early in the last Ice Age and has hundreds of languages and the majority of the world’s language families. Just as Afrika south of the Sahara contains the bulk of human genetic variation, so that the human world can be seen ethnically as a number of ethnicities inside Afrika plus a handful outside it, so can the human race be seen linguistically as a few hundred language families in New Guinea plus a few outside that. Melanesians as an ethnicity are perceived by White people as Black, but in fact many of them are blond and they are quite distant genetically from Afrikans, with a relatively large proportion of Denisovan DNA. It’s important to emphasise that languages spoken in Papua, which is about twice the size of Great Britain, can be as unlike each other as English is from Navajo, although there are some areal features such as a tendency to put the verb at the end of the clause. There are also some Austronesian languages spoken in Papua, i.e. the relatives of Indonesian, Malagasy and Hawaiian. It’s also worth pointing out that although I’m mainly referring to Papua here, this situation applies to the whole of New Guinea although the western half is politically part of Indonesia. The island has eight hundred languages in sixty families. There is also one Australian language spoken within the borders of the national territory.

Papua New Guinea therefore has an unsurprising need for auxiliary languages. Its official languages are English, Police Motu and Tok Pisin. Police Motu is actually Austronesian but cannot be understood by speakers of the related Motu. Austronesian languages are usually very simple and straightforward, so although the language is not officially either a pidgin or a creole, it is similarly simple. It’s called Police Motu because it was adopted by the police force in the area, but pre-dates them, and is therefore usually called Hiri Motu. While I’m talking about the southern side of the country, in the extreme east of Papuan territory on Bougainville Island (which I presume is where Bougainvillea grows but I don’t know), the Rotokas language has the shortest alphabet of any written language, with just A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U and V.

Tok Pisin itself has the same grim origin as Bislama. Although its vocabulary is mainly English, it’s also borrowed words from Malay, German (which also once had a creole in this area) and Austronesian languages, but apparently not Papuan ones, which I think needs some explanation. One reason German is significant is that the slaves in Queensland were later taken to German Samoa.

Listening to Tok Pisin gives me a similar impression to hearing Malay/Indonesian in that it makes me wonder why other languages bother with all that grammar stuff. That’s a sloppy use of the word of course, but there are few inflections in the language, even compared to English, whose own word-isolating nature may be connected to its creolisation back in the ninth century. For instance, Tok Pisin has only two prepositions, “bilong”, which means “of”, and “long”, which means everything else. My accent of English has twelve vowels, and in the nineteenth century the Australian English spoken in the area would probably have had more although my accent is sometimes perceived as close to Ozzie. Tok Pisin has five, and seventeen consonants. Like Bislama, it has inclusive and exclusive words for “we”, “yumitupela” (“you-me-two-fellow”) and “mitupela” for the dual inclusive and exclusive respectively along with “yumitripela” and “mitripela” and “yumi” and “mipela” for the trial and plural. It has no gender, expresses the continuous with “stap” and the past with “bin”, from “stop” and “been”, and the perfective aspect with “finis” (“finish”). It uses a small vocabulary very inventively, and tends to adopt Austronesian idioms and translate them into Tok Pisin, as with “gras bilong het” – “grass belong head” – “hair” (on the scalp). As can be seen from its name, the scope of words tends to be wider than in English, with “tok” also meaning “language”, “speech” or “word”. It probably goes without saying that no English strong verbs exist in the language at all.

One feature which Western European languages tend not to be very keen on for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom is reduplication. It used to exist in the earlier Germanic languages in verbs like “let”, “row”, “sleep”, “sow”, hey” to indicate the passive and the past, but the only modern English word which shows traces of it is “hight”, meaning “be called” and “call oneself”. Clearly it’s still widely used outside Europe, and Tok Pisin does it. For instance, the words “ship” and “sheep” have fallen together, and therefore the word for “sheep” is now “sipsip”, and “natnat”, which is clearly “gnat-gnat”, means mosquito but there is no word “nat” as far as I know. It happens with verbs as well, as in “tanim”, meaning “turn”, and “tantanim” for “spin round and round”. This particular use is a little similar to the original Germanic tendency to reduplicate verbs which express repetitive actions such as sowing and rowing, which I think emphasises that in the end there is just language, not better or worse languages. Other functions can be illustrated thus: “kala” – “colour”, “kala-kala” – “multicoloured”; “wil” – “wheel”, “wil-wil” – “bicycle”; “kain” – “sort”, “kain-kain” – “diverse”.

There’s also the question of register. The word “as”, as well as meaning “arse”, also simply means “bottom” or “basis”, so for example the constitution is called the “arse law”, which could hardly be more formal, meaning “fundamental law”. Another instance is “bagarap”, “bugger up”, which simply means “ruined” or “broken” with no overtone of obscenity.

Like some Austronesian languages, Tok Pisin also has what I’m accustomed to call the “sign of the nominative”. I think of this in the following way. There are generally prepositional ways to express cases, for instance “bilong” for the genitive, in many languages, although of course some do simply inflect the words involved. English has a very strong tendency to do this, but what it never does is use one for the nominative. Tok Pisin does, in a way, by using “i”, presumably from “he”, to express even the nominative case in some situations. This is also known as the predicate marker. Another notable feature is the use of the verbal suffix “-im”, which is used to mark transitive verbs, i.e. verbs with objects such as “I like her” – “mi laikim em”.

Regardless of the values and culture of, for example, Port Moresby, which are distinctly questionable, particularly in terms of the patriarchy (and I have to mention this because I don’t want anyone going away with the impression that this is not being acknowledged here), Tok Pisin probably represents the future of English, though the details are bound to be different. It represents a continuation of a trend which can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European through Proto-Germanic, runic texts, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Modern English, present-day English of continuing simplification of grammar and speech sounds, or rather, a shift from inflection to the use of invariable words to modify meaning. This trend can be seen in languages all over the world, and there’s no reason not to expect English to do the same. Few people now use the pronoun “thou”, many strong verbs have become weak, we have only two marginal cases for nouns, we use “have” to express the perfect tense universally rather than “be” in many cases, and so forth. Tok Pisin is clearly influenced by the grammar and sound of other languages, but so will English continue to be in the future.

I will close with a Tok Pisin version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Papa bilong mipela
Yu stap long heven.
Nem bilong yu i mas i stap holi.
Kingdom bilong yu i mas i kam.
Strongim mipela long bihainim laik bilong yu long graun,
olsem ol i bihainim long heven.
Givim mipela kaikai inap long tude.
Pogivim rong bilong mipela,
olsem mipela i pogivim ol arapela i mekim rong long mipela.
Sambai long mipela long taim bilong traim.
Na rausim olgeta samting nogut long mipela.
Kingdom na strong na glori, em i bilong yu tasol oltaim oltaim.
Tru.

The Afrikaans Language

There’s a rather minor movement, with which I comply, to spell Afrika with a K. I’ve written about this previously on here but I can’t find it. I have certain issues with it because it doesn’t seem entirely coherent to me. The claim is that no native Afrikan language spells it with a C, and therefore to do so is colonialist. There’s a similar argument applied to the spelling of Mexico with an X or a J, which incidentally even extends to Texas/Tejas. However, since there are several native Afrikan scripts which don’t even have these letters, and other non-Latin scripts used there which lack them too, the very use of the Latin alphabet to write the name of the continent could be seen as imperialist since it’s originally a European alphabet. But there’s another more complicated issue, which at first seems very different to how it turns out to be on closer examination: the Afrikaans language.

Certainly to me in the 1980s, and I presume also to others who were involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Afrikaans language, which first arose in South Africa before it actually was South Africa among the White invaders in I think the eighteenth century, symbolises White imperialism and the oppression of the indigenous people. Now I’ve never been to South Africa so I’m talking about this from a great distance conceptually and geographically, but one of the notable things Afrikaans does orthographically is to spell “Afrika” with a K. Therefore you have a situation where Francophone Black Afrikans spell it with a Q and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Black Afrikans spell it with a C. Swahili does spell it with a K. In Namibia, the Küchendeutsch spoken there also spells it with a K. Hence the Germanic languages spoken in Southern Afrika, both of which could be seen as colonial interlopers, use a K. But it’s not that simple.

It’s probably worth briefly sketching the nature of Afrikaans before I go on. Afrikaans is probably the easiest of all foreign languages for a first language Scots or English speaker to learn. It would presumably be even easier for a Dutch speaker because it could be argued to be merely Dutch. The irony for an Ingvaeonic language speaker such as myself (Scots, Yola, English, Frisian, Tok Pisin and some other creoles) is that it’s probably easier to speak and understand Afrikaans than even the more closely related Frisian, because the process of creolisation simplifies grammar in the same direction as English, which may also be a creole (Danish-Anglosaxon), has evolved. Hence the oft-quoted sentence “my pen is in my hand”, which is the same in English and Afrikaans, though differently pronounced. Two notable features of Afrikaans are that it’s simplified Dutch and that its grammar is practically analytical – it expresses ideas with separate words which don’t change much. The verbs are, as a rule, even simpler than in English, lacking the strong conjugations we have with verbs such as “drive” and “take”. It isn’t the same language as Dutch though, because although Dutch people could understand Afrikaans speakers with ease, the reverse isn’t true because of the more inflected grammar.

However, Afrikaans is not purely Dutch. It also borrows from Malay because of the Malay community in the Cape colony, who were not in fact always Malay but used the bafflingly easy Malay language as a lingua franca. I don’t know much about the history of Malay, but its simplicity, though shared with many other Austronesian languages, is so extreme that I wonder if it has itself become creolised at some point.

Afrikaans was originally a pidgin spoken between the Dutch invaders and the San and Bantu people of the Cape which is said to have evolved within a generation of the Dutch arriving there because of the use of Bantu and San house servants to care for White children. Quite remarkably, in spite of its external image as the language of the White Apartheid régime, the majority of Afrikaans speakers are non-White: 60% in fact. It’s spoken mainly in the west of the country, and it’s also spoken in a small town in Kenya called Eldoret, which was founded by Afrikaners. Outside Afrika, Australia is the country with the most speakers. It’s given English a few words, including “aardvark”, “aardwolf” and “veldt”, and South African English, unsurprisingly, has considerably more. Unsurprisingly, it has borrowed from Khoisan and Bantu languages but also from Portuguese. The Oorlams dialect, spoken in Namibia, even has clicks, since ethnically they are descended mainly from the San. This probably means, though I haven’t tested it, that there are two completely separate sources of clicks in that dialect. In the fairly closely related German, clicks occur as allophones weakly between words ending in T and words beginning with K within phrases, and this seems to happen in English too, so it can be expected to happen in Afrikaans. More on the possible connection with Khoisan later.

It’s said to be a myth that the language was ever majority White, connected to the idea of White settlers “civilising” the area. The earliest written records use Arabic script and were written in a madrasa, again bringing it closer to Malay. The Cape Malays in fact used Afrikaans extensively. Due to White Afrikaner nationalism, Afrikaans was portrayed as a purely Germanic language. It was famously used as a weapon in 1974 when it was imposed as a medium of education, which led to the Soweto uprising, and this further stigmatised and polarised the language as belonging to Whites.

As a foreigner, one thing that strikes me about the language is that it seems to have greater contact with the San community than with speakers of Bantu languages. Afrikaans is in a sense a Khoisan language, as fifty percent of them speak it. Ethnically, that’s substantially where it belongs, and I suspect this shows in its structure. Bantu languages are grammatically quite complex and heavily inflected. There’s a large number of noun classes, nouns are inflected using prefixes and verbs are conjugated for subject and object. Khoisan languages are very different, although they may not be closely related to each other at all, which may reflect the extremely ancient heritage of the San. They have more consonants than any other spoken languages and it’s as if all the meaning and energy is piled into these sounds, because grammatically they’re isolating. The Bantu language Swahili, spoken well outside South Africa, has many Arabic words and inflects them as if they’re native. Had Bantu languages been a strong influence on Afrikaans, it could be expected to do similar things to the language as Swahili has done to words of Arabic origin, but it doesn’t. Most creoles, with the exception of one spoken in Canada, simplify grammar, so it’s hard to disentangle, but the isolating nature of Khoisan languages seems to me to be a possible candidate for their influence on Afrikaans, and I suspect that White Afrikaans speakers would have preferred to have thought that their language was White when in fact the influence of the San is clear in the grammatical structure.

What I don’t understand, probably because of my ignorance of South African history, is why Khoisan seems to have been so much more influential on the language than Bantu. Even Malay seems to have more sway over it. Anyone wiser than I willing to give an explanation?