Orthography

Bislama is a written language with a spelling system that has been developing for several decades. The development of the written form of the language coincided initially with the greater use of the language for religious purposes with the first translations of the gospels being produced in the 1970s, leading up to a translation of the entire Old and New Testaments by 1997. The 1970s also saw a rise of political consciousness associated with a sense of nationalism. The struggle for independence, along with political debates and campaigns since then, have largely been conducted through the medium of both spoken and written Bislama.

The spelling system largely reflects the set of phonemic contrasts presented earlier, with orthographic ng representing /ŋ/ , j representing /c/, y representing the glide /j/, and ae and ao representing the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ respectively. Some etymologically – rather than phonemically – based spellings have become more or less universally accepted. In particular, the word-final voicing contrast in English is typically maintained in the Bislama spelling system for words of English origin, even though the voicing contrast is not made by most speakers. We therefore find an orthographic contrast in Bislama between dok ‘warehouse (< dock)’ and dog ‘dog’, even though phonemically both can be represented as /dok/.