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Tok Pisin Texts
From the beginning to the present
Tok Pisin is one of the most important languages of Melanesia and is used in a wide range of public and private functions in Papua New Guinea. The language has featured prominently in Pidgin and Creole linguistics and has featured in a number of debates in theoretical linguistics. With their extensive fieldwork experience and vast knowledge of the archives relating to Papua New Guinea, Peter Mühlhäusler, Thomas E. Dutton and Suzanne Romaine compiled this Tok Pisin text collection. It brings together representative samples of the largest Pidgin language of the Pacific area. These texts represent about 150 years of development of this language and will be an invaluable resource for researchers, language policy makers and individuals interested in the history of Papua New Guinea.
[Varieties of English Around the World, T9] 2003. x, 284 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 4 September 2006
Published online on 4 September 2006
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- Sociohistorical and grammatical aspects of Tok PisinPeter Mühlhäusler | p. 1
- I. From early contacts and Gut Taim Bilong Siaman: (the Good Old Days of the German Administration) | pp. 35–56
- II. Indigenous voices 1920–1945 | pp. 57–64
- III. The use of Tok Pisin by missions and government | pp. 65–78
- IV. Indigenous voices 1950–1970 | pp. 79–86
- V. Traditional indigenous voices 1970 to the present | pp. 87–150
- VI. Translations of foreign voices | pp. 151–180
- VII. Urban Tok Pisin and the influence of English | pp. 181–212
- VIII. New written genres | pp. 213–266
- IX. Creolized varieties of Tok Pisin | pp. 267–280
“The main attraction of this work is that it fills a previously unoccupied niche by providing a reasonably compact source book for students of Tok Pisin, who can get a broad sampling of the language over the course of its development and use it as a springboard for more in-depth study.”
Stuart Robinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Language 81(4), 2006
“This collection of texts is a gold mine for any serious student of Tok Pisin. It is especially useful for those who do not live in , or have not had the opportunity to travel to Papua New Guinea. The editors are a virtual Who's Who Tok Pisin research in the 1970s and 80s, and each has made an important contribution to Tok Pisin pedagogy.”
Geoff P. Smith, in English World Wide 27(3), 2006
Cited by (20)
Cited by 20 other publications
Neuenschwander, Christoph
2025. Pacific transformations of the ‘Country of Babel’. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 40:2 ► pp. 262 ff.
Watbled, Jean-Philippe
Boer, Jennifer, Mary Claessen & Cori Williams
Redman-MacLaren, Michelle
Kosecki, Krzysztof
Roberge, Paul T.
Redman-MacLaren, Michelle, Tracie Mafile’o, Rachael Tommbe & David MacLaren
Levisen, Carsten, Carol Priestley, Sophie Nicholls & Yonatan Goldshtein
2017. The semantics of Englishes and Creoles. In Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, ► pp. 345 ff.
Capone, Alessandro
Capone, Alessandro
Sharifian, Farzad
Sharifian, Farzad
Walczyński, Marcin
Nevalainen, Terttu & Matti Rissanen
Bobyleva, Ekaterina
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.