English Kamtok Tok Pisin

Come Kam Kam

Don't come No kam No kam

He isn't coming/hasn't come / no kam Em i no kam

Multiple negation is common as a form of emphasis. No man no laik mi no smol. (Nobody likes me at all.)

One particularly interesting feature is the use of pre-verbal particles to show that an action is continuing, i.e., to show ‘continuous aspect.’ We can see this in the use of de, ape, and kain the following examples taken respectively from English, French, and Portuguese creoles: a de go wok (‘I’m going to work’ in Krio); mo ape travaj (‘I’m working’ in Louisiana French); and e ka nda (‘He’s going’ in St Thomas).

Case study: Tok Pisin

The example of Tok Pisin is useful in considering how a pidgin expands and develops into a creole. It was not until the 1960s that the pidgin was nativized, i.e., children began to acquire it as a first language, and, therefore, becoming for them a creole (while remaining an extended pidgin for previous generations). Muhlhausler has noted that in Tok Pisin grammatical categories such as time and number have become compulsory, a word-formation component has been developed, devices for structuring discourse are now present, and there are opportunities for stylistic differentiation. So far as functions are concerned, Tok Pisin has become symbolic of a new culture; it is now used in many entirely new domains, e.g., government, religion, agriculture, and aviation; it is employed in a variety of media; and it is supplanting the vernaculars and even English in many areas.

Aitchison has also noted what is happening to Tok Pisin. She points out four kinds of change. One of these is that people speak creoles faster than pidgins and they do not speak them word by word. Consequently, processes of assimilation and reduction can be seen at work in Tok Pisin: ma bilong mi (‘my husband’) becomes mamblomi. A second change is the expansion of vocabulary resources: new shorter words are formed, so that paitman (‘fighter’) exists alongside man bilong pait (‘man of fight’). There is also much borrowing of technical vocabulary from English. A third change is the development of a tense system in verbs. Bin is used as a past time marker and bai, from baimbai (‘by and by’), as a future time marker. Finally, greater sentence complexity is now apparent.