This is the first online dictionary translating simultaneously between English and the three most widely-spoken English-based creole languages in Melanesia.
While there are about a thousand indigenous languages across the region, the focus of this project is the comparison of the three English-based creole languages that are used most extensively: Pijin, Bislama, and Tok Pisin. These three are the most widely-spoken languages of, respectively, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea, and all share a great deal of similarities.
There are of course other Melanesian creole languages not represented here, but for the moment they lie beyond the scope of this project, in which we restrict our focus to English-based national languages.
Torres Strait Creole would be the next logical addition to this project, as although it isn't the language of a country, it has a lot in common with Tok Pisin. Looking at text samples, it clearly exists in the same sphere as these other three languages and so would be interesting to compare. Resources are a bit harder to come by unfortuately, though a good starting point looks to be Schnukal's dictionary (ISBN 1875872744).
Fiji, being the only independent country not represented in this project, would also be a reasonable next step. But, as far as I can tell, the language in common use there is an indigenous Fijian one. Interestingly though there is an Awadhi-based creole, Fiji Hindi, in popular use among the Indo-Fijian community.
New Caledonia seems to mostly get by in French, with a few French-based creoles scattered around but not seeing widespread use. And in the Papuan provinces of Indonesia, an Indonesian-based creole is in day-to-day use. For a treatment of a similar such language used in Maluku, see [my first dictionary project](https://bahasanusantara.com).
While I may in future add all of these to the site for completeness, at the moment they all lie beyond the scope of this project. Currently the focus is to study and present side-by-side these three sister languages from three neighbouring countries.
The data for Pijin is derived predominantly from a digitisation of the word lists featured in Pijin: A Trilingual Dictionary by Christine Jourdan and Ellen Maebiru (available here), and Gerry David Beimer's thesis Pijin: A Grammar of Solomon Islands Pidgin (available here). The Jourdan paper features a full dictionary with context, grammar notes, and example usage, but for now I've limited this page to the abbreviated word list. Beimer's list seems to be derived from Jourdan's dictionary.
The Bislama data comes from a word list presented on bislama.org.
Tok Pisin seems to be the most widely-documented of the three. Here the data comes mostly from digitising Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin English Dictionary by Craig Alan Volker (ISBN 9780195551129), with the addition of the Wikibooks Tok Pisin Dictionary (available here) and supplemented by the language data available on kaikki.org.
All three have, however, been modified and supplemented by additional context and data found by the author in various other bilingual documents and social media, and have been subject to significant regularisation in the process of combining them.