Quadrilingual Dictionary of Melanesian Creoles

Over the past couple of months I’ve been digitising a few dictionaries of the English-based creole languages of Melanesia, and have now combined these into a single online dictionary.

Melanesia is a somewhat ambiguously-defined collection of southwestern Pacific islands, encompassing the countries of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, in addition to New Caledonia (a French territory), the Torres Strait Islands (Australia) and the easternmost provinces of Indonesia (the five Papuan provinces, and occasionally also Maluku).

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 extensively: Pijin, Bislama, and Tok Pisin. These three are the most widely-spoken languages of, respectively, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea. All share a great deal of similarities, and each represent an entire country.

But what about the other territories mentioned above? Torres Strait Creole would be the next logical step in 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, while the current focus of this dictionary is English-based creole languages (interestingly though there is an Awadhi-based creole, Fiji Hindi, in popular use among the Indo-Fijian community).

As for the rest, 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.

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 of this project is to study and present side-by-side these three sister languages from three neighbouring countries. They’re each official languages of an entire nation, they’re used every day by the people living there, and all of them are creoles based on English. If, instead, the aim were to collect together one language representing each region of Melanesia (which may well end up being the goal of this project), then these languages would of course all be worthy additions. In the limit of infinite spare time this project would be a repository documenting every single language found in the region, but that really would be far beyond my abilities. So for the moment let’s just restrict our focus to some achievable, interesting subset which covers a large part of the region, and which yields some fascinating insights when presented together.

(Info about sources and processing)