The lexicon of Tok Pisin

The great majority of lexical items derives from English. However, whether this justifies the description of Tok Pisin as a “variety of English” is open to question, especially if the grammar as well as the derivation of the lexicon is taken into account. Some of the English words in use at the time they entered the emerging pidgin in the 19th century are now obsolete although they may survive in Tok Pisin. An example is giaman ‘lie, deceit’, from the informal English “gammon” in common use at that time. Other words of English origin may be similarly difficult to recognize as they have been reinterpreted in a grammatical role. Examples include the reinterpretation of the English pronoun he and him as the predicate marker i and transitive suffix -im respectively. Most words adopted from German now appear to be obsolescent, although a few, such as beten ‘pray’ and rausim ‘take off, expel’ (from German heraus ‘get out’) are still in common use.

Words have also entered Tok Pisin from a number of other languages, and internal word-formation processes of the expanding pidgin have provided additional lexical resources. There appear to be one or two survivals from languages of the Pacific such as lotu ‘church service’ from Samoan and kanaka ‘bush person, hillbilly’ from the Hawaiian word for ‘person’, but by far the greatest source of non-English vocabulary are the languages of the New Britain and New Ireland area to the north-east of the New Guinea mainland. As noted above, the early pidgin spoken in Samoa took root in this area, and words needed for flora and fauna or cultural items tended to be taken from languages of this area. Tracing an exact source is not always easy, as a word may have a similar form in several related languages. Much of the confusion about specific vernacular sources for Tok Pisin etyma was cleared up by Ross (1992). Typical items from languages of this area include kurita ‘octopus’, muruk ‘cassowary’, karuka ‘pandanus’, kunai ‘sword grass’, pukpuk ‘crocodile’, umben ‘fishing net’ and many locally occurring fishes and trees. Few items from the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea mainland have been adopted, but borrowing is continuing. More recently, speakers of Tok Pisin who also have a reasonable command of English are borrowing a large number of items from English.