Пиджин-инглиш:временная вещь?/Is `Pidgin English' Just a Makeshift?

Let's consider for a moment what a pidgin language is. Why pidgin? The name has nothing to do with the bird. It's most likely `business' as pronounced by speakers of languages who couldn't wrap their tongues around our word. So we'll assume it's `Business English'. Many peoples around the world regularly use a modified form of English to each other when they don't speak each other's language and need to get some basic trading done.

Here's what a couple of simple sentences in Pidgin English look like. We'll write the sample three ways: (1) as this particular language is customarily written, (2) as the words would look if spelled in standard English, and (3) a translation of it.

(1) Long moningtaim Dogare i kirap long slip na i baim bas i go long taun bilong painim wok. Em i raun i stap na i kamap long opis bilong wanpela kampani masta.

(2) Along morning-time Dogare he get-up along sleep and he buy'im bus he go along town belong find'im work. Him he round he stop and he come-up along office belong one-fella company master.

(3) In the morning Dogare woke up and caught the bus to town to look for work. He walked around and arrived at the office of the manager of a company.

There are two reasons why the sentences in italics look so alien to us. One is simply that the pidgin is spelled phonetically, following the ways the speakers of these unrelated languages pronounce the English words. For instance, pain `find', pela `fella' and opis `office' show that the speakers have no sound `f' in their own languages, so they hear a `p' as the closest thing to it. The other and more interesting reason is that our familiar English grammatical patterns are only partially being followed. The English language is here being extensively modified to feel more comfortable to the speakers of the languages using it for communication - not with us but among themselves.

The Pidgin English illustrated above is the one known as Tok Pisin (are you ready to guess which two English words those are?). It is widely spoken in Papua New Guinea, a country that is home to hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages, none of which dominates. It is a popular notion among us that pidgins are corrupted and rudimentary English, hardly above the gesture-and-grunt level. But they re not primitive or lazily-used languages. They are creative and have evolved a complex set of phonetic and grammatical rules of their own. Tok Pisin, for instance, has a highly developed and standardized vocabulary and grammar, and allows its speakers the full range of expression that any language does. Today it is extensively used in press and broadcast media.

Did you know that there are dozens of English-based pidgins all around the world? They are most common in three areas: Melanesia (centered on the large island of New Guinea in the South Pacific), the coastal region of West Africa, and the West Indies. English is by no means the only widely-spoken language that has provided the basis for a pidgin. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Swahili and Malay have all served this purpose.