The pidgin spread throughout Vanuatu when the workers returned home, and it became a creole when children, mostly in urban areas, began speaking the pidgin as a native language. The pidgin relied heavily on English vocabulary, but the grammar (both the sentence structure and the sound patterning) was based on that of the native Melanesian languages of the speakers. The Ni-Vanuatu spoke many different native languages, and in order to communicate with each other and the English-speaking plantation owners, a pidgin was formed. The origins of Bislama were in the late 1800s when Ni-Vanuatu (indigenous people of Vanuatu) were taken as slaves or as recruits to work on plantations in Australia and other Pacific countries. Although they differ from one another a great deal, in the very broadly defined group of global Englishes, Bislama and Canadian English are both members. Bislama is, however, an English lexifier-creole, which means that much of its vocabulary came from English (thus an English-lexifier) but that structurally it began as a blend of several languages (thus a creole). Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, a small island nation in the South Pacific, where I recently returned from a month of fieldwork.īislama is not a dialect of English but rather a separate language.

It is in this vein that I offer the following brief introduction to another variety of English - Bislama. After weeks of studying different topics related to English in Canada in the undergraduate Canadian English course at Queen's, students are always eager to learn how, and why, the English in Canada differs from the English spoken in other parts of the world.

In addition, one could consider how Canadian English relates to other varieties of English around the globe. With a small population of only 252,000 people, this makes Vanuatu the most language-dense country in the world.Author: Anastasia Riehl, Strathy DirectorĪs a topic of inquiry, there are many aspects of Canadian English that one could consider: grammar, spelling, language policy, historical change, regional variation, literary styles, and so forth. Today, Bislama is the common language that is used between Ni-Vanuatu people that come from the 83 islands of Vanautu and who together speak 113 languages. When the survivors of the Blackbirding returned to their islands in the early 20th century, this pidgin became widespread and is the origin of the widely spoken Bislama in Vanuatu, Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea and Pijin of the Solomon Islands. This pidgin allowed communication between the native populations and also with plantation owners, European traders and settlers. Coming from many different islands that each had their own local languages, a form of pidgin English was developed that combined English words with the grammatical structures from the Pacific region.

English and French are also widely spoken in Vanuatu and together with Bislama are the 'official' languages.īislama was developed during the 1870's and 1880's in the ' Blackbirding' era when thousands of Ni-Vanuatu were forced to work on plantations in Australia and Fiji. Bislama is based on English with 95% of the words having English origins and the remainder being French and local words. Bislama is the National Language of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific, 1750 km north east of Australia.

Vanuatu pidgin english