Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A pidgin based on English and spoken in Papua New Guinea.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun A
creole ofIndo-European ,Malayo-Polynesian and Trans-New-Guineanlanguages (principally English andKuanua ); one of the official languages ofPapua New Guinea .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Go read up on Tok Pisin, or Bislama for more on that.
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It's a site that covers information on a wide variety of languages spoken around the world, including Malayalam, Pashto, Quechua, Dakota, Tok Pisin and many others that you probably aren't familiar with we weren't.
Archive 2009-09-01 Judy 2009
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It's a site that covers information on a wide variety of languages spoken around the world, including Malayalam, Pashto, Quechua, Dakota, Tok Pisin and many others that you probably aren't familiar with we weren't.
Online Resources: World Languages Judy 2009
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Better still, Tok Pisin creatively combines fragments of English, German, and indigenous Melanesian languages to generate new words:
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Even English slang, as in bugger up, has yielded the very common Tok Pisin word bagarap.
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Simplified international English and Tok Pisin, by contrast, emerge and evolve with no official guidance.
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Ann, to the extent you remain unconvinced, perhaps this invocation of higher authority in Tok Pisin will suffice to convince you that speakers of English -- and of the many tongues that are evolving from it without official or officious interference -- will shape language perfectly well on their own:
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Already we have seen such developments as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and 'Singlish' in Singapore, which derive from English but are now so different in form that they would be largely unintelligible to a monolingual English speaker.
On languages uniting people DC 2006
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As Saving Private Ryan demonstrated, fubar emphatically is not a German word, even if Tok Pisin does take its word raus directly from the language of Goethe and Schiller.
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By contrast, languages as diverse as Tok Pisin, Samoan, Taiwanese, and Cherokee take care to distinguish between first person plural pronouns that include the listener and those that exclude the listener.
First Person Plural 2006
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