Similarities between South Pacific, West African and Caribbean pidgins and creoles

Around the world, there can be found many English-based creole languages which share several similarities, despite the considerable geographical distances separating the countries where these languages are found. These similarities can be seen at all levels of structures, especially in grammar. This happens because of the way these languages have developed out of the kind of languages that black slaves used in America and the Caribbean. However, many distinctions can be drawn between the various Caribbean creoles, and between these and the varieties of Black English Vernacular and the English-based creoles of West Africa, although it is considered that they belong to the same “family” of languages, which are closely related in structure and idiom.

South Pacific

Two creole languages that can be found in this region are Tok Pisin and Bislama. While the former is an official language of Papua New Guinea, the latter is one of the official languages of Vanuatu, which is located some 1,750 kilometers east of northern Australia. Both languages share the same origins. The Tok Pisin is a result of Pacific Islanders intermixing, when people without a common language were sent to work on plantations in Queensland (Australia) and various islands nearby. In the case of Bislama, in the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Pacific islanders were also sent to Queensland and Fiji. With many languages in contact, those two pidgins were formed, among several others. These pidgins have traditionally been treated as varieties of a single Melanesian Pidgin English or "Neo-Melanesian" language.

As it has been said, these languages share some linguistic features, one of them being the combination of English vocabulary with local grammatical structures:

- One of the most surprising grammatical features is the existence of only two prepositions. The first one is long, and the second bilong (in Tok Pisin) or blong (in Bislama). This one means for or of in Standard English and the first means everything else.

- With regard to verbs, the tense is indicated by separate words like bin (for past tenses) and bai (in Tok Pisin) or Bambae/Bae (in Bislama), for future tenses. In the case of Tok Pisin, the word stap is used for progressive tenses. Besides, most verbs have a suffix (-im) to indicate transitivity.

- The noun does not indicate number. Because of this characteristic, the word ol is used to indicate plural, which comes from the English word all. Therefore, the words do not have a plural suffix.

- Another shared feature refers to pronouns. In both languages, there can be found singular, dual, trial and plural personal pronouns.

West Africa (Kamtok – Cameroon)

Kamtok is the pidginised English of Cameroon. As well as Tok Pisin and Bislama, this language works as a lingua franca in the country since at least 1880s. In the particular case of Kamtok, it is difficult to state whether it is a widely-used pidgin or a creole, because multilingualism is the norm in the country and the same language can be a mother tongue, a language of wider communication and a first, second, third, fourth or foreign language.

The development of Kamtok has been influenced by political and economic interests of different European countries, as in the case of Tok Pisin and Bislama. This is the reason why different European languages had an impact in the language, especially in the lexicon. Referring to its origin, some similarities between Kamtok and South Pacific pidgins are found, as the first one came into being in the Slave Trade Years (1440 to early 1880s). Kamtok was necessary for those Baptist missionaries who arrived in Cameroon in 1845. With the arrival of Germans, the language took flight in German plantations and undertakings by forced laborers.

Considering vocabulary, there is a strong influence of vernaculars (especially in the lexical fields of food), as well as the impact of French (especially in the lexical fields of education, employment and fashion).

With regard to grammar, Kamtok has some similarities with languages from the South Pacific, but also some differences.

- One of the latter is the inventory of personal pronouns. Kamtok has an eight-term set of personal pronouns (less than Tok Pisin):

a, mi 'I' mi 'me'yu 'you (singular)''i 'he, she. it' i, -am 'him, her, it'wi 'we, us'una, wuna 'you (plural)'dem 'they' dem, -am 'them'

- Concerning the plural, it is not usually marked. But, in order to avoid ambiguity, plurality can be carried by a modifier or by using the word dem (from the English word them) after the word. However, recently many plurals have been taken into the language, such as aidiaz (ideas), chips, machis (matches), pleaz (football players), sohks (socks) or twinz (twins). Moreover, a few uncountable nouns have been pluralised, like advaisis (pieces of advice), johngks (items of junk) or slangz (slang terms).

- There are two ways of expressing possession. One of them is similar to Tok Pisin or Bislama, as it is formed by using a word. While in Kamtok it is used the word ohv, in

Tok Pisin it was the word bilong. Another form of marking possession is by means of the Saxon genitive (i. e. an added –s or –z), as in Standard English.

- Another similarity is that the verb is normally not marked for tense where the time is understood. Besides, auxiliaries are used to indicate aspect and time. For instance, there can be found the word bin (as in Tok Pisin) to express past actions.

Caribbean – Jamaican Creole

Jamaican Creole is an English-lexified creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. The language developed in the 17 th

century, and it was because of the Slave Trade (similarly to Tok Pisin, Bislama and Kamtok).

Jamaican pronunciation and vocabulary are significantly different from English, despite heavy use of English words or derivatives. Moreover, Jamaican Creole displays similarities to the pidgin and creole languages of West Africa (like Kamtok), due to their common descent from the blending of African substrate languages with European languages.

Here, there is a list with those similarities between Jamaican Creole and West African languages:

- There are no morphological marked past tense forms corresponding to English –ed or –t. There are two preverbial particles: en and a.

- West African languages generally do not have two consonants together but alternate them with vowels. This way, some consonants are dropped (send – sen, last – laas, Spanish – Panish…) and some vowels are added (small – sumaal, snake – siniek, spoon – supuun…).

- For pluralization, the third person plural pronoun is added to the noun (man + they > man dem, father + they > faada dem…).

- The existence of serial verbs: carry him + go > kyaa him go.

- Although it is not an influence of West African languages, Jamaican Creole uses the word fi to express possession. Remember that in Tok Pisin it was used the word bilong and in Kamtok ohv.