Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin ("talk pidgin") is the most widely used of Papua New Guinea's three official languages (alongside English and Hiri Motu), with ~4M total speakers — only ~150K as L1, the rest as the vital lingua franca across PNG's 800+ indigenous languages. It is part of the Melanesian Pidgin continuum (sister to Bislama in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands Pijin), and originated on 19th-century Bismarck Archipelago plantations during the German colonial era (1884–1914), retaining German loanwords like raus ("out"); its word for "airplane," balus, is not German but comes from Tolai/Kuanua, where it named a pigeon and was repurposed. The Tolai (Kuanua) Austronesian language provided much of the grammatical substrate. Standardized in the 1956 Methodist orthography and codified in the 1971 Mihalic Jacaranda Dictionary; Wantok Niuspepa (since 1970) is the major weekly news outlet, and Tok Pisin radio and Bible translations have established it as the de facto inter-ethnic medium of PNG.

Wear this language Pick the words you like, printed in the same typeface the map uses. Make a T-shirt from Tok Pisin words →