Vocabulary. Tok Pisin can sound very colourful in its use of words, which are derived from English (with Australian influences)

Tok Pisin can sound very colourful in its use of words, which are derived from English (with Australian influences), indigenous Melanesian languages and German (part of the country was under German rule until 1914).

• balus ‘airplane’ or ‘bird’ (from a Melanesian word for ‘bird’)
• belhat ‘angry’ (lit. ‘belly hot’)
• belo ‘lunch’ (from the bellow of horns used by businesses to indicate the lunch hour has begun)
• maus gras ‘moustache’ (‘lit. mouth grass").
• meri ‘woman’ (from the English name Mary). Also means female, e.g. ‘Bulmakau meri’ (lit. ‘bull cow female’) = cow.
• olgeta ‘all’ (from all together)
• pisin ‘bird’(from pigeon). The homophony of this word with the name of the language has led to a limited association between the two; Mian speakers, for example, refer to Tok Pisin as wan weng, literally ‘bird language’.
• pasim – ‘close, lock’ (from fasten)
• pasim maus ‘shut up, be quiet’, i. e. yu pasim maus ‘lit. you close mouth’ = ‘shut up!’
• tasol ‘but, only’ (from that's all)

By way of conclusion the basic features of pidgins and creaoled can be summarised in the following way.

A Pidgin

· is a contact language or lingua franca that arose naturally (not like e.g. Esperanto)

· does not have native speakers

· is reduced in linguistic form and grammar

· is restricted in contexts of use

· is typically unstable and highly mixed

· may some times be a stable variety with norms of acceptability,

· but is NOT a fully adequate natural language.

Also, Pidgins: