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GROWING UP WITH TOK PISIN: CONTACT, CREOLIZATION, AND CHANGE IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA'S NATIONAL LANGUAGE. Geoff P. Smith. London: Battlebridge, 2002. Pp. xii + 244. £18.00 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2004

J. Clancy Clements
J. Clancy Clements
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

Papua New Guinea (PNG), with its 842 languages among its roughly 3.8 million inhabitants, constitutes the most linguistically complex society in the world. Of the various lingua francas used in PNG for communication among speakers of different languages, the English-based Melanesian pidgin Tok Pisin—originally brought to PNG in the late 1800s by New Guinean laborers from plantations on Samoa—has become a national language and one of the most widely used language varieties in the country. As a pidgin, it is mostly used as a second language (L2), although it is increasingly becoming a native language (L1) of many younger generation speakers. This nativization of Tok Pisin has been less an object of study than its use as a lingua franca.

Type
BOOK NOTICES
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 141 - 142
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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