Sociolinguistic situation of contemporary Pijin

Since the 1960s, Pijin has become the main language of the capital city of Honiara and the mother tongue of many young urban adults and of a new generation of young urban children who know no other language but Pijin. Pijin is not only the medium of communication of urban life, it is the medium of a type of culture that is different in many respects from the cultural world of the plantations and villages. In Honiara, the strong position of Pijin is reinforced by the very high degree of language diversity we find in town (most of the 64 vernaculars of the country are represented in Honiara). People migrating to town had to learn Pijin quickly if they wanted to create a social life for themselves outside of the limits of the wantok system (wantok ‘friend’). Due to the high number of inter-ethnic marriages in town, Pijin progressively found its way within the family circle, whereas it used to be used almost exclusively with non-family members, and particularly, with non-wantok people. The contexts of Pijin usage in town are far more diverse than they were when the language served as a plantation pidgin: Pijin is used for church services and church-related activities, in the public service, on the radio, in political circles and in parliament, in family life and other domains of urban social life. Over the years, Pijin has acquired some cultural depth that is expressed lexically through the borrowing of new words from English (e.g. kompiuta ‘computer’) or through expansion of the lexicon from Pijin roots (e.g. masta liu ‘unemployed’ masta ‘master’ + liu ‘hang around’). The opposite result is that the lexicon, and the phonology, are changing quickly. A sociolinguistic norm essentially based on urban Pijin is appearing and is becoming the measure by which young urban people evaluate Pijin competence in others: they are quick to denigrate and make fun of non-urban ways of speaking the language, and to associate ‘old’ words with provincial ways of speaking and with lack of social sophistication. In the process, old words such as panikini ‘cup’, furumbutu ‘step on’, gras ‘hair’ are progressively being lost from the vocabulary of young urban people and are replaced by kap ‘cup’, stepem ‘step on’ and hea ‘hair’. This meets with much resistance from provincial and older speakers, who are quick to qualify urban Pijin as rabis (‘bad’) and overly anglicized. In the provincial areas of the country, people tend to have access to Pijin at a much earlier age and in wider contexts of communication than before.

Despite not having the official status of a national language, Pijin has become the true national language of the Solomon Islands, the only linguistic mortar that has the potential of binding this new country together. Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu have recognized the major roles played by Tok Pisin and Bislama respectively in these countries by giving them national language status. One hopes that the Solomon Islands will soon do the same for Pijin.

But although Pijin is widely spoken, it is not widely written. Despite the efforts made by the Literacy Association of the Solomon Islands (LASI) and the Solomon Islands Christian Association (SICA) through the works of Solomon Islands Translation Advisory Group (SITAG), the language is not a popular medium of written communication. There are many reasons for this situation: Pijin lacks institutional support from government agencies, and it lacks cultural legitimacy. In addition, schooling at advanced levels is done in English, the official language of the country, and this puts pressure on the children to learn English at an early age. Over the years, new tools such as word lists (Beimer 1995) and dictionaries (Simons and Young 1978; Jourdan 2002) have been produced. No comprehensive grammar is publicly available yet.

Along with the lack of official legitimacy of the language comes a lack of a bona fide standard variety of Pijin. Variation therefore can and does flourish, both within and across sociolinguistic boundaries. This poses some difficulties for the unitary description of Pijin, including the level of phonology and phonetics. We have attempted to provide a conservative description of the phoneme inventory of Pijin below, followed by an introduction to the range and types of variation that may be displayed by different speakers. It should be kept in mind that even such basic description will be unavoidably tinged by analysis, and that what we provide here is a preliminary sketch of a complex situation.