Peter Mühlhäusler
It is worth considering what is known about the new languages and societies that emerged on four specific groups of Pacific islands in the last 250 years: Ngatik Island, Palmerston Island, the Bonin Islands, and Pitcairn Island. The existence of the first three has remained virtually unknown, while that of Pitcairn Island has been written about in hundreds of books and articles.
The idea that languages on islands are either laboratory cases for particular aspects of human languages or special cases that provide counterexamples to general theories of language has been a frequent topic in the history of linguistics. My entry into the field of pidgin and creole studies was motivated by three important questions: How do languages come into existence? How do languages develop over time? And how do languages change and disappear?
I realised that as a linguist I was in a position similar to a geneticist wishing to unravel the workings of genetics and the emergence of new species. To achieve this, a geneticist would be ill advised to breed pandas, giraffes, or hippopotami, all of them large animals who breed slowly with complex nutritional requirements. They are not the sort of animal a coin-starved genetics department could afford to keep. Instead, such scientists study fruit flies, rats, and guinea pigs which are subject to the same principles of development but cost only a fraction to study. The linguistic analogue of these fast breeders are pidgins, creoles, and similar contact languages. Studying the principles of development in derivational morphology in Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin English) over a period of 80 years (1895–1975) gave me access to information which in a language like English would have emerged over 800 years. This position confirmed my view that pidgins and creoles are ideal guinea pigs for linguists interested in time-related matters. It is not accidental that language development and variation studies were heavily influenced by the insights from these languages.
Reducing the time depth in language study is only the beginning of making a less abstract linguistics possible. Geographical and social space needs to be similarly constrained to reduce the vast number of interactions between the world and language. It is for this reason I consider the endemic contact languages spoken on small islands and, more precisely, those locations with a shallow history of human occupation. Prominent among these are contact languages that emerged on remote islands in the wake of European colonisation. The social settings of these languages include plantations, trade, non-traditional settlements including missions and boarding schools, and ethnically mixed island beach communities. It is the last category that is my focus.
Research questions are part of any particular paradigm. In the case of linguistics, they are linked to the question whether language is a natural or a socio-historical phenomenon. To wit, researchers have endeavoured to find out whether the structural similarities between the then known pidgins and creoles and similar contact languages were the consequence of diffusion, the similarities of the social circumstances that brought them into being, or the result of a universal bio-programme that became activated wherever there was insufficient linguistic input to a new generation.
In the 1970s when pidgin and creole linguistics gained momentum, Reinecke and others wrote a chapter in their Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages on ‘Pitcairnese’:
Pitcairn Island English with its offshoot on Norfolk Island is of extraordinary interest because it offers as near a laboratory case of Creole dialect formation as we are ever likely to have. The place, the time and sequence of events, and the provenience of each of the handful of original speakers are known as are most of the subsequent influences upon the Pitcairnese community and, to a lesser extent, upon the one on Norfolk.
The term ‘laboratory’ used by Reinecke suggests the need for controlled empirical research. Surprisingly, no serious empirical research on Pitkern and its sister language, Norf’k, was carried out until 25 years later in 1995 when Mühlhäusler began his longitudinal study of the Norf’k variety and in 2007 when Nash started his research into the language and place-knowledge of Norfolk Island, followed by his linguistic fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 2016. Like the studies by Ehrhart and Hendery on Palmerston Island, Long on the Bonin Islands, and Tryon on Ngatik, Mühlhäusler and Nash conclude that the languages which developed on these small islands were hardly examples of Urschoepfung (spontaneous creation) but the result of complex historical processes and singularities. Zettersten’s proposition that there are common elements in all languages which find their home on isolated islands seems to be problematic.
Creolists noted that children exposed to deficient linguistic input such as Pidgin English inevitably ended up speaking a creole that shared the properties of full first languages. Derek Bickerton claimed that the numerous perceived similarities in first-generation creole languages in fact reflected a universal bioprogramme. Given that existing creole languages had been spoken by several generations and affected by socio-historical contingencies, he proposed an island experiment to generate a new first-generation creole (see Peter Bakker’s article in this volume).
While a professor at the University of Hawai’i, Bickerton applied for a grant to try to empirically support his concept of the bioprogramme of which I was one of the assessors. His plan was to pay six families with young children to live on the uninhabited Micronesian island of Ngemelis. Each family would be unable to speak the other’s language, and was to be supplied only with a common vocabulary of 200 artificially created words. Although the United States National Science Foundation had funded the project, the University of Hawai’i’s ethics committee refused to allow the research to be carried out. The group deemed the work unethical.
Ngatik Island English
The island of Ngatik is the main island in the Sapwuahfik Atoll, approximately ninety miles south-west of Ponape (Pohnpei) in eastern Micronesia. With less than 1-square kilometre of landmass, Ngatik has a population of roughly 500, who live relatively isolated from Pohnpei. The indigenous language of Ngatik is the Sapwuahfik dialect of the Austronesian Pohnpei language. There also is an English-based contact language spoken, known as Ngatikese Men’s Creole. The language is spoken by men among themselves. They call it ‘pidgin English’ or ‘broken English’. It used mostly in work situations, sailing, casual conversation, recreation, and joking. Though the men insist that women do not understand or use it, women occasionally speak the language in joking conversation.
Its genesis, like that of the other three languages discussed in this paper, occurred in the context of the development of numerous utopian island beach communities in the Pacific. Their inhabitants were sailors who had jumped ship, adventurers from all continents, and Pacific Islander women. Most of these chaotic communities only lasted a short time and either came to grief or were absorbed into mainstream society as colonial control was established. However, on the islands discussed in this paper both ethnogenesis and glottogenesis occurred and the new societies and their languages have persisted.
The origin of Ngatik Island English dates back to violent conflicts between the inhabitants of Pohnpei and surrounding islands and the white community. These conflicts came to a head in 1837 when the British cutter, Lambton, sailed to Ngatik, where her captain, Charles ‘Bloody’ Hart, hoped to get hold of a valuable hoard of tortoise shells he believed to be there. On not finding the treasure, the crew massacred all the men on the island. They left behind some European and Pohnpeian crew members who took the women on the island as their consorts. An Irishman named Paddy Gorman assumed the role of chief. Over the next decades, the population of Ngatik began to build up again.
What developed linguistically from this situation was a mixed language derived from the South Seas Jargon/Pidgin of the 1830s, spoken in the beach communities of Micronesia, and Ngatikese. Tryon notes similarities with the Pidgin English used in New South Wales, which he ascribes to “the constant contacts with Sydney during the early years.” This contact language contains a large number of English-derived word and grammatical forms, together with a very considerable Ngatikese element, which is the dominant element in this pidgin language. Tryon claims this language is different from other English-based contact languages:
Ngatikese Pidgin cannot really be described as an English-based pidgin in that English contributes less than half of its lexicon and morpho-syntactic markers. Indeed, there is a great deal of mixing of Ngatikese Pidgin and Ngatikese Ponapean in the data collected.
These differences are because Ngatik is isolated and situated away from shipping routes and whaling grounds. Unlike on Palmerston Island and Pitcairn Island, the first generations of children were not educated in English. The fact that the eventual colonial powers up to the end of WWII were Spain, Germany, and Japan mitigated against the development of a more English-dominated men’s language. Ngatikese Pidgin was not used as a medium of general intercommunication but as a gender-specific language in limited domains.
In the twenty-first century the language has become endangered and Ngatik Island English is spoken mainly by the older generation.
Palmerston Island English
Palmerston Island is an atoll of approximately one square mile located about 700km from Rarotonga. There are indications of a pre-European Polynesian settlement. When James Cook discovered the atoll in June 1774, it was uninhabited. Cook appears to have been unimpressed with Palmerston’s appearance. Norman Douglas remarks on the beginnings of settlement:
In 1862 an Englishman, William Marsters, established his family, by three Polynesian wives, there. He divided his family into three clans, the ‘head’, the ‘middle’ and the ‘tail’, and drew up family laws which forbade members of a clan marrying within the clan. The Marsters family, who speak a local form of English, have remained in occupation of the island.
William Marsters (1831–1899) was an English adventurer from Walcote, Leicestershire. He married Charlotte Farmer of the same village in 1851 and had two children by her. Around 1853 he left his family to seek his fortune first in the goldfields of California and subsequently in the Pacific, where he arrived around 1856. He first settled in Penrhyn, Cook Islands, and married the daughter of an island chief. The couple then moved to Manuae, which no longer had a Polynesian population, and then to the even-more-remote Palmerston Island. They were accompanied by his wife's cousin with whom he later had children. His task was to produce copra and collect bêche-de-mer (sea cucumbers) for a Tahitian trader named Brander. Brander never returned. Marsters decided to settle his family permanently on the island. He took up a third wife, and set up a permanent settlement.
Marsters was a strict patriarch. He established his own school and insisted from the start that every child must learn English. For the first two generations, William Marsters’ linguistic norm was a law everyone tried to follow as much as possible. For the generation born after his death, this was less so. When Marsters died he had 23 children and 134 grandchildren. About 25 of his descendants continue to live on Palmerston, but more than 1,000 now live in the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Rachel Hendery emphasises the extreme isolation of Palmerston, which, together with the small size of its population, looks like a linguistic laboratory:
After 140 years of near-total isolation, the inhabitants of Palmerston Island, a tiny atoll in the Cook Islands group, have developed a unique linguistic and cultural identity that draws on both English and Polynesian backgrounds. They consider themselves ‘English’ in many ways – ethnically, culturally and linguistically – yet also have strong ties to the rest of the Cook Islands, and to New Zealand. The small population and the isolation of the island mean that it is possible to (a) record all Palmerston Islanders, and (b) track all external influences on the language, making Palmerston Island a wonderful opportunity for studying the development of a linguistic and cultural identity in small mixed-origin communities. During four weeks of fieldwork in 2009, I spoke with all of the then-inhabitants of the island except for one elderly man, who is blind and deaf.”
The kind of English spoken on Palmerston was described by occasional visitors variably as Pidgin English, English, vaguely reminiscent of the south-west of England, curious provincial English, quaint, old Midlands English, and archaic seafaring English with an added dash of the South Seas. Royal Navy Commander, Victor Clark, was shipwrecked on Palmerston during a remarkable 48,000-mile voyage. Of the islanders, he observed in 1960:
Their isolation and the passage of time has produced what might be described as a 'basic basic English' of quaint character and rustic accent perhaps handed down from old William. Many words have become corrupted and some appear to be original, but on the whole their talk is quite easy to follow and provided I used simple words, I was understood by them.
Bonin Islands (Osagawara) English
The Bonin Islands (or Ogasawara) comprise of 30 islands of which only two are inhabited. They are located about 600 miles south east of Tokyo. Today, they form part of Tokyo Prefecture, Japan. They lie about half way between mainland Japan and the Northern Mariana Islands. The name Bonin is derived from a contaminated Japanese word meaning uninhabited. In the early nineteenth century the Bonin group became a calling point for English and American whalers and in 1827 the crew of a wrecked whaler became stranded here. Two of the crew decided to remain and they were joined over the following years by deserters, adventurers, and time-expired labourers with their Hawaiian women. The demographic details of the society in the 1820s was: Male: 3 from USA, 1 Cape Verde; 3 London, 3 locally born; 3 Marquesans, 2 Tahitians; 2 from Oahu. Female: 28 from Oahu; 1 from Guam; 2 locally born.
A couple of decades later there was mention of inhabitants of other nationalities including a man from Bermuda, a Manilla man, a term referring to Malays rather than Filipinos, and two Japanese women. Daniel Long also mentions speakers of Danish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Importantly, native English speakers were a small minority.
It is said that in the early days it was a colony of semi-savages, murdering one another and altogether leading a barbaric existence. Russell Robertson adds in 1876:
Popular rumour had ascribed to the Bonins a colony of semi-savages, murdering one another and altogether leading a barbarous existence. I found a small colony of settlers, living to all outward appearances in decency and order, cleanly in their attire, civil in their address and comfortable in their homes. Such is the bright side. The dark picture is the utter apathy of the settlers; their indifference to anything outside of what goes to satisfy their immediate wants; their suspicion in some cases of one another. No religion, no education, old men and women hastening to their graves without the one, children growing up without the other - and there is a darker picture than this.
Information about the linguistic habits of the settlers has been scarce. The fact that the islands came under Japanese control in 1873 probably accounts from the lack of interest in this group by Westerners. This changed when Daniel Long embarked on fieldwork in the 1990s. He convincingly demonstrates that the language of intercommunication among the original settlers was an unstable Pidgin English with a considerable amount of Hawai’ian lexicon. This impoverished form of speech was developed into a creoloid, a form of speech with characteristics similar to creoles but which did not go through the pidgin stage, by the first generation of children born there. Long hypothesises that the children born and raised in this language environment must have acquired this pidgin as their native language, a process he refers to ‘creoloidisation’. He uses this term because the evidence from the earliest visitors indicates that island English was not pidginised enough as to be incomprehensible to outsiders. This process is unlike what occurred on Pitcairn Island and Ngatik in the early stages of their languages gelling.
The situation after 1873 is complex, as Japanese occupation brought large numbers of settlers. The Japanese established the first schools on the islands, initiating bilingual English and Japanese education. Increasingly, intense bilingualism among the Westerners led to the development of a new language, which comprised Japanese sentence structure with Bonin Island English words and phrases incorporated into it. Long writes:
The Ogasawara Mixed Language continues to be used among the ‘Westerners’ today, but the younger generation is monolingual in a basically standard variety of Japanese. So we see that, in the 170-year linguistic history of the Bonin Islands, the dominant language has shifted from English (from 1830) to Japanese (in 1876), back to English (in 1946), and back again to Japanese (in 1968).
The outbreak of WWII led to a forced evacuation of roughly 7,000 of the 8,000 civilian non-combatants then living on the Bonin Islands. In February 1945, US Marines landed and in the subsequent bloody battles, around 22,000 Japanese and 6,800 Americans died.
After the Japanese defeat, the islands were placed under the direct control of the US military. In 1946, the US allowed islanders of Western descent, i.e. descendants of the original islanders to return, around 130 in all. They replaced the bilingual school with an English-medium school, which promoted a gradual shift to more acrolectal (the prestigious variety) English as the medium of intercommunication.
Long contends that Bonin Islands English bears little resemblance to other Pacific contact Englishes and emphasises the role that the geographical and social factors of isolation from the outside world and intense contact within the community can play in the development of unique new language. He seeks to answer questions such as: How do children, for example, assemble a complete language (a creole) out of the imperfect ‘broken’ speech (a pidgin) used by their parents and all the other adults around them? Are such pidgins and creoles the only types of language systems that can come from language contact or do other types exist? What role does island factors like isolation from the outside world and intense inner-contact among islanders play in language change?
Long also comments on the relationship between language use and identity. The ‘Westerners’ learned in the mid-twentieth century that they did not have to retain English in order to maintain their identity; the use of Bonin Islands English would suffice. In times of Japanese control it made its users distinct because, being a mixture of Japanese and English, it differed from the speech of the Japanese residents. In the post-war period, the Bonin Islands English functioned to set its users aside from the US Navy personnel because those people were using only English.
Pitcairn Island English
Pitcairn Island is located 5,539 kilometres from the nearest point in South America. Its nearest neighbour, Mangareva, French Polynesia, is 540 kilometres away. Pitcairn Island has an area of 5 km2 and is only accessible by boat from the island’s only natural harbour, Bounty Bay. It is one of the most remote sites of human habitation on the planet. It is a British Overseas Territory administered from New Zealand, some 5,519 kilometres distant. The current population amounts to fewer than 50 inhabitants.
Pitcairn Island had been abandoned by the Polynesians and was uninhabited when the mutineers of HMAV Bounty and their Polynesian consorts settled there in 1790. The history of the Mutiny on the Bounty and the subsequent history of the mutineers and their descendants has been told and retold for more than 200 years. David Silverman writes in 1967:
The Pitcairn Island story, if only in dim outline, is known to many. Its various aspects recall many of the classic clichés, legends, stories, and parables of the Western world. Pitcairn Island is the very prototype of the man-and-woman-cast-up-on-an-island which has become a cartoon genre. It is the Bali Hai of the song, that special island. It is complete with Fayaways. It is the Swiss Family Robinson. It is Robinson Crusoe with sex. It is Adam and Eve and the apple, it is the Fall – the Redemption. It is the story of the Exodus, the Revelation, and the Promised Land. It is Utopia. Unplanned and imperfect Eden, Pitcairn has survived many pre-calculated versions of the perfect community.
The mutiny occurred in what is modern-day Tonga on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. Bounty had left England in 1787 on a mission to transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies. A five-month layover in Tahiti, during which many of the men lived ashore and formed relationships with native Polynesians, and many of them were reluctant to sail back and submit to Bligh’s military discipline. After three weeks back at sea, Christian and others forced Bligh from the ship. Some of the mutineers settled on Tahiti, but nine mutineers and an entourage of six Polynesian men and thirteen women under the command of Fletcher Christian begun to search for a place of refuge. They finally arrived on Pitcairn Island in January 1790.
The first ten years were characterised by extreme violence and dysfunction. All six Polynesian men were murdered and seven of the nine mutineers were either murdered or victims of drink or disease. By 1800 there was only one male survivor, John Adams, previously known as Alexander Smith. As was the case with William Masters on Palmerston Island, there are several accounts of his provenance, the most likely that he left his wife and children in his native Scotland to enlist on Bounty. Adams was an uncouth violent drunk but the story goes that one night in 1800, he saw the Archangel Michael who instructed him that the island’s children must be taught to read from the ship’s Bible. He also told him to swear off alcohol. This he endeavoured to do after his redemption.
Because of its remoteness, Pitcairn was not visited by any outsiders until the American Captain Matthew Folger landed there in 1808. He was met by some men in a boat, who hailed him in good English. They told him that a man of the name of Smith was waiting for him at one of their houses to which he was conducted.
Whereas the story of John Adams’ redemption became an important topos throughout the nineteenth century, the Anglicisation of culture and the linguistic developments on Pitcairn featured much less. The first work of substance is an edited 1964 . The first dedicated linguistic fieldwork was carried out by Joshua Nash from May to August 2016.
Reinecke opined ”Only two languages, English and Tahitian, were in contact.” To explain the nature of Pitkern, as it is often called today, as either a mixture of these two languages or as a creole developed by the children misses three important points: The language used in the contact between European sailors and Tahitians was not native Tahitian but an emerging Maritime Polynesian Pidgin; by the time Bounty visited Tahiti, its use had become institutionalised as a medium for communicating with Europeans; and there was an unstable kind of Pidgin English mixed with Tahitian words in use in the first generation but the later stable form of the language was not so much the result of creolisation by the children, but due to their exposure to an English-based creole.
This language involved was St Kitts English Creole spoken by Bounty midshipman, Edward ‘Ned’ Young . Ned was the second last male survivor. Unlike his companions, he was well educated and a mild-natured man, liked by the women and the children. He was the principal linguistic socialiser of the children. A significant part of the core lexicon, about 50 items including many fish names, several salient phonological properties, and some grammatical one are of St Kitts origin. Importantly, Ned Young established the diglossia that has prevailed on Pitcairn Island from the beginning: In informal and intimate settings a contact language, Pitkern, is used. Standard English is mandatory in education, church, other formal settings, and dealings with outsiders. To ensure that English remained spoken, John Adams invited an Englishman, John Buffett, in 1823 to take over the education of the children before his death.
From the 1820s to the 1850s Pitcairn Island became one of the busiest ports in the Pacific, with hundreds visits from American and British ships calling to take on citrus and other provisions. The captains of the numerous New England whaling ships often left their wives in the care of the pious Pitcairners, while Pitcairn Island men served on American vessels.
With an ever-increasing population, the resources of Pitcairn Island became scarce. In 1856 the entire population of 194 was resettled Norfolk Island, which was offered to them by Queen Victoria, where most of the Pitcairn Island descendants still live. A small number of Pitcairners moved back to Pitcairn Island in the 1860s and were joined there by new arrivals from America, including Seventh Day Adventist missionaries who converted the entire population. Pitkern again illustrates how new island languages develop to become management tools of the social and physical ecologies in which they are used.
This account of four English-derived island beach community languages has shown there are numerous differences in the social factors that lead to the emergence of new languages as well as reasons for how their structural properties evolve. The new languages that developed on the four islands discussed here illustrate that languages are needed as tools to manage the complex communication requirements of new, multilingual societies.
Such languages are also needed to manage the natural ecology of the island whose topography and life forms were largely unfamiliar to the new arrivals. This was not a problem on Ngatik whose female inhabitants were indigenous. Placenames and names for plants and animals on the other three islands were adapted from English and Pacific languages, or derived from the names of individuals.
Given the urgent need for an adequate means of intercommunication and management, islands are often ‘linguistic pressure cookers’, allowing us to observe language changes over a few generations that might well have taken centuries in mainland situations. All of the languages discussed here came into being within one generation and have changed significantly over 200 years. Labels of convenience such as Pitkern or Palmerston English are applied to a number of different ways of speaking across several developmental stages of language development.
Standard English is increasingly used on all four islands. The persistence of the traditional ways of speaking reflects their importance as markers of identity. With the increased influence of new media, all four of these languages have become endangered. Official support for language maintenance and revival is only found for Pitkern and, to a much greater extent, the closely related Norf’k language spoken by around 400 Bounty descendants on Norfolk Island.
The distance of the various creoloids from English reflects a number of parameters, including the presence of English medium schools (right from the start on Palmerston Island and early on on Pitcairn Island but not on Ngatik Island or the Bonin Islands); the presence of English speaking role models (on Palmerston Island, Pitcairn Island and the Bonin Islands, but not Ngatik Island) and the languages of the colonial powers (only Pitcairn Island and Palmerston Island were English colonies).
The term ‘utopia’ in the title of this article at first sight seems inappropriate, because at least three of the new island communities started of as chaotic and dystopian. However, within one generation these societies had acquired most of the desiderata of a utopia. Pitcairn Island is a pertinent example. It had compulsory education for boys and girls and universal suffrage from the 1820s. The island’s regulations and laws meant the health of its population was better than that of Britain. We can observe a similar emergence of order out of chaos on the other three islands as well. Parallel to the development of social order was the development of orderly linguistic solutions capable of managing the islands’ requisite social and natural ecologies.