Pidgin and Creole Languages

Abstract IN his speech to the English-speaking Union Conference in Ottawa, the Duke of Edinburgh made reference to one of the best known pidgin and creole languages in observing that he was ‘referred to in that splendid language as “Fella belong Mrs. Queen”‘. Although the Duke was right to consider Tok Pisin (‘talk pidgin’) spoken in Papua New Guinea as a language rather than a dialect of English, he was wrong about his designation. He would be called ‘man bilong kwin’. Contrary to what many Europeans think about Tok Pisin,fella cannot be used in this way at all to mean ‘man’ or ‘husband’, so the Duke’s statement is ungrammatical. Fella can be used only as a suffix in Tok Pisin and has a number of grammatical functions, e.g. to mark adjectives and numerals, as in tupela blakpe!a pik ‘two black pigs’, and to mark the second person plural form of ‘you’, as in yupela i no ken go ‘you (plural) cannot go’.