Text Messaging in Tok Pisin: Etymologies and Orthographies in Cosmopolitan Papua New Guinea

ISSN： 1473-5784

Source： Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol.54, Iss.3, 2013-11, pp. : 265-284

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Abstract

This essay examines an aspect of the historical trajectory of Papua New Guinea's creole language Tok Pisin. A medium key to colonisation, pacification, and nationalisation, Tok Pisin's fortunes as a ‘real’ language in popular perception can be tracked through the orthographic choices that have clarified or obscured the etymological connections to the colonial, English-language past. Scholarly approaches to Tok Pisin and other creole languages have concentrated on the orthographic reflection of the regularities of structure that index ‘full’ languaged-ness and modern national autonomy. In contrast to this project of linguistic nationalisation, contemporary Tok Pisin speakers are developing repertoires of speaking/writing that invoke Tok Pisin's connections to Australian English even as they do not conform to it, an enregisterment of forms obscuring the boundaries between Standard English and Tok Pisin. As a convention used by youth in SMS and similar contexts, this practice subverts a prior generation's language ideology by pairing the lateral connections of new media with a repudiation of creole orderedness.