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In:Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Almoaily
[Creole Language Library 47] 2014
► pp. 7–40

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Ethnohistory of speaking

Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in a trilogy 
of historical-sociolinguistic attestations

 | University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
Published online: 29 January 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.47.02dre
Because most non-European pidgins-creoles have not survived into modern times, their study requires alternative, complementary historical analyses under the heading of the ethnohistory of speaking: philology (or the systematic reconstitution of early attestations by triangulation with contemporaneous or modern comparative linguistic data) and ethnohistory (or the critical interpretation of historical documents by ethnological criteria). Three examples illustrate Maritime Polynesian Pidgin, a Polynesian-based pidgin of the eastern Pacific for the early colonial period, with grammatical patterns and uses reminiscent of Pidgin Hawaiian, but extending regionally to the Society Islands, New Zealand, and overseas locations and with a greater time depth since the late eighteenth century. These data also lend startling support to the “broken Polynesian” portion of South Seas Jargon (Clark 1977, 1979).
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