The resulting “simple form of language” 8 is not spoken as a native language by anyone of the participants. In most cases the underlying principle is: “Making maximum use of minimal grammatical resources” 7. In the majority of cases, the dominating group, which came for example to trade with the other group, spoke a language (called lexifier 6 ), giving the new pidigin its lexis, whereas the dominated ones used a tongue/tongues which donated the new pidgin its grammatical base. Swann defines pidgin or pidginised languages as a “new and initially simple form of language that arises out of language contact between two or more groups of people who do not share a common language͘” 5 Those contacts mainly had business or slavery reasons. People saying it is still a pidgin stress that more than 90% of its speakers have a different native language background. Primarily the fact that Tok Pisin is spoken by thousands of native speakers and has “functions and grammatical features found in typical creoles” 3 makes people categorizing it as a creole.
It is a controversial issue, whether Tok Pisin and the other Melanesian Pidigins can be called creole or not. English, the “language of the urban elite” 2, is only used by a small population group. Tok Pisin (“talk pidgin” 1 ) is widely spoken across Papua New Guinea, whose population, according to the 2015 Census, was 7.5 million. After giving a definition of the object of investigation, the essay also seeks to provide an insight into the external history of Tok Pisin. For this purpose, it is necessary to take a closer look at individual words of Tok Pisin, which is along with English and Hiri Motu one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea. The language Tok Pisin has been introduced in the course of this semester’s seminar “Pidgin and Creole Languages”͘ This term paper primarily raises the question in what way the German language took influence on Tok Pisin.
German influence and German Tok Pisin Vocabulary
0 kommentar(er)
