Contact varieties

A number of the contributions focus on the English-based pidgin and creole languages in the Pacific and Australasia. Generally speaking, pidgins are a type of makeshift language that springs up when speakers of different linguistic backgrounds come into contact and need to talk. In the formation of a pidgin, there are always two (or more) languages that are involved, although the pidgin takes one language, usually the socially dominant one, as its point of origin for the lexicon. It is this language that contributes most of the vocabulary, though significant features of the grammar are likely to derive from other sources. At one time there were many more pidgin varieties in these regions. In the pearling fisheries around Broome in Western Australia, for example, pidginized forms of Malay were used during the early part of the last century. But pidgins such as this one are typically as short-lived as the social circumstances that spawned them and Broom Pearling Pidgin is now extinct. If the contact ceases or the different groups end up learning each other’s language, the pidgin will then drop by the wayside.

If the situation stabilizes, however, and the contact continues, there can be a very different outcome as the language expands beyond its original very limited context of use. Change is then typically rapid, especially in vocabulary and grammar, as the makeshift pidgin metamorphoses into a fully-fledged and dynamic language, able to serve its speakers in all kinds of settings and circumstances. In theory it is straight-forward to say when a pidgin ends and a creole begins, at least according to those definitions that see pidgins and creoles as separate stages in a single process of development – as soon as children in a community are brought up speaking the pidgin as their first language, it becomes a creole. Accordingly, a creole is simply a nativized pidgin. The linguistic reality, however, is another matter – linguistically it is impossible to say where the boundary lies. Even before a pidgin becomes some-body’s first language, it can develop a highly elaborated structure (close to that of a so-called creole), if it is used for a number of different purposes. For this reason some linguists avoid the labels “pidgin” and “creole” and refer to these varieties straightforwardly as “contact languages”.

Clearly, both Australia and New Zealand offer situations where English comes into close contact with other languages. Since European contact, Aboriginal Australia and Maori New Zealand have seen members of several language groups living in the same community and engaging in daily interaction. In Australia, pidgins based on English appeared not long after the arrival of the Europeans. The pidgin varieties became increasingly important for contact, not only between Aboriginal speakers and English speakers, but also as a lingua franca between speakers of different Aboriginal languages.

It has long been observed that linguistic change follows closely on the heels of drastic social upheaval. We see striking illustration of this in the evolution of the creoles in these regions. After the arrival of Europeans in Australia, for example, there came extreme social disruption with the movement of Aboriginal people to mission stations, pastoral properties and towns. More than ever before Aboriginal people from different linguistic groups found themselves together and needing to communicate. Although there had always been widespread bilingualism among adults, this was not adequate to cover communicative needs in these new settlements, where children of different linguistic backgrounds were thrown together and where there was continued uneven interaction between Aboriginal and English speakers. Pidgins therefore fulfilled the communicative needs of these speakers. Out of these, creoles evolved in the Kimberley Region, the Roper River area and parts of North Queensland. These various English-based creoles have much in common, but they also show some regional differences too. These depend on the Aboriginal languages represented in the community where the pidgin originated and also influences from other pidgins and creoles brought into Australia from the outside.

In New Zealand the situation was somewhat different. As Ross Clark (1979) documents, in the early 1880s a “foreigner-talk” system known as South Seas Jargon was used in various parts of the Pacific primarily between European whalers and indigenous crew members, some of whom were Maori. In New Zealand this jargon developed into Maori Pidgin English which was used for early contact between Maori and Pakeha (or European New Zealanders). However, this pidgin never stabilized enough to evolve further. For one, in New Zealand there was only ever a single indigenous language, so there was never a need for a lingua franca between indigenous groups as there was in Australia. The historical records also suggest that the most common pattern was for English speakers to learn enough Maori to communicate. As a result the New Zealand pidgin was short-lived. However, Maori continue to be recognizable linguistically when speaking English through their preferential use of a wide range of linguistic forms, especially with respect to pronunciation.

The Pacific/Australasia part contains descriptions of six other contact languages: Bislama (as spoken in Vanuatu), Solomon Islands Pijin, Tok Pisin (as spoken in Papua New Guinea), Hawai‘i Creole, Fiji English and Nor-folk Island-Pitcairn English. The first three creoles all have their roots in earlier Melanesian Pidgin and share lexical patterning and a number of structural characteristics. However, different external influences (for example, contact with French for Bislama and with German for Tok Pisin) and interaction with different local languages have given rise to distinct developments within these varieties. Hawai‘i Creole is another English-lexifier contact language, but also draws vocabulary from Hawaiian and Japanese. Although its story is very different, it does have episodes in common with the creoles from the southwestern Pacific: (1) early links with South Seas Jargon (as mentioned above, a jargon variety used for short-term communication by crews on ships and by individuals on shore in various locations around the Pacific Islands) and (2) input from Melanesian Pidgin spoken by labourers recruited for the sugarcane plantations in the early 1800s. These four Pacific contact varieties have, since the beginning of the 20th century, undergone substantial functional and structural expansion.

Fiji English shows many characteristically creole features although it is technically not a creole. For one, there is the absence of a stable pidgin at an earlier stage. Descriptions such as “creoloid” and “semi-creole” for this variety attest to the blurred nature of the category creole (cf. discussion earlier). Fiji English also has historical links with the previous creoles and these links are still evident in lexical and grammatical relics of Melanesian Pidgin (originally introduced by plantation labourers during the 19th century).

Norfolk Island-Pitcairn English represents the linguistic outcome of contact between the British English of the Bounty mutineers and Tahitian. It is a remarkable example of a contact language since we know precisely the number of speakers who originally settled on Pitcairn in 1790, the places of origin of these speakers and even their names. However, its subsequent development has not yet been fully established and although there are clear early influences from the Pacific Pidgin English of the Melanesian islanders on Norfolk, the exact relationship of Norfolk Island-Pitcairn English to the contact varieties just described is problematic.

Variation within these speech communities is considerable. Speakers of Melanesian Pidgin, for example, frequently switch between, say, Bislama or Tok Pisin and their local variety of Standard English. The situation can become even more complicated because of the so-called “creole continuum”. Take the example of the interaction of Kriol with Aboriginal English and Australian English. As previously discussed, linguistic labels such as these give the impression of easily identifiable and neatly compartmentalized entities, but such tidy classifications are not reality. The many different varieties of English and creole that Aboriginal people speak range from something which is virtually identical to Standard Australian English in everything but accent (dubbed the “acrolect”) through to pure creole which is so remote from Standard Australian English as to be mutually unintelligible (dubbed the “basilect”). In between these two polar extremes you find a whole range of varieties (or “mesolects”). Generally, speakers have command of a number of these varieties and they move along the continuum according to the situation and the audience.

The label “variety of English” might at first seem problematic when dealing with these creole varieties, especially at the basilectal end of the continuum. These are very different Englishes in all respects – vocabulary, grammar and phonology. The very “unEnglish-looking” structures that characterize creoles, as well as their unique development (as contact languages resulting from pidgins), set them apart. There is also the question of the lack of mutual comprehension. Moreover, these languages have distinct names of course – Bislama, Tok Pisin, Kriol. The speakers themselves would never call their language a kind of English. Nonetheless, these contact languages share vocabulary and grammatical features that align them with the English of the international community. All have links of some sort with the group of continental Germanic dialects that ended up in the British Isles sometime in the 5th century AD. These off-springs of English are clearly an important dimension to the diversification of English world-wide.