When I arrived in Papua New Guinea and first heard Neo-Melanesian, I was scornful of it. It sounded like long-winded, grammarless baby-talk. On speaking a form of English according to my own notion of baby-talk, I was disturbed to discover that New Guineans did not understand me. My assumption that Neo-Melanesian words meant the same as their English cognates led to spectacular disasters, notably when I tried to apologize to a woman in her husband's presence for accidentally jostling her, only to find that Neo-Melanesian pushim does not mean 'push' but instead means 'have sexual intercourse with'.
Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules. It was a subtle language that let one express anything sayable in English. It even let one make some distinctions that cannot be expressed in English except by means of clumsy circumlocutions. For example, the English pronoun 'we' actually lumps together two quite different concepts: 'I, plus you to whom I am speaking', and 'I, plus one or more other people, but not including you to whom I am speaking'. In Neo-Melanesian these two separate meanings are expressed by the words yumi and mipela respectively. After I have been using Neo-Melanesian for a few months and then meet an English-speaker who starts talking about we', I often find myself wondering, 'am I included or not in your "we"? Neo-Melanesian's deceptive simplicity and actual suppleness stem partly from its vocabulary, partly from its grammar. Its vocabulary is based on a modest number of core words whose meaning varies with context and becomes extended metaphorically. For instance, while Neo-Melanesiangras can mean English 'grass' (whencegras bilong solwara [salt water] means 'seaweed'), it also can mean 'hair' (whence man i no gat gras long head bilong em becomes 'bald man').
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for colonists and workers who speak differing native (first) languages and need to communicate with each other. Each group (colonists or workers) retains its native language for use within its own group; each group uses the pidgin to communicate with the other group, and in addition workers on a polyglot plantation may use pidgin to communicate with other groups of workers. An illustration of how quickly pidgins may arise is given by my own experience soon after I first arrived in Indonesia. An Indonesian worker and I were dropped together by helicopter in an uninhabited mountain range to survey birds. We had no Indonesian/ English dictionary, knew nothing of each other's language, and could teach each other words only by pointing. Within a week we had evolved a crude pidgin, based solely on Indonesian nouns, to communicate about camp chores: for instance rice fire meant 'to cook rice', while bird binoculars meant 'to watch birds'.
Compared to normal languages, pidgins are greatly impoverished in their sounds, vocabulary, and syntax. A pidgin's sounds are generally only those common to the two or more native languages thrown together. For example, many New Guineans find it hard to pronounce our consonants/ and v, but I and other native English speakers find it hard to pronounce the vowel tones and nasalized sounds rampant in many New Guinean languages. Such sounds became largely excluded from New Guinean pidgins and then from the Neo-Melanesian Creole that developed from them. Words of early-stage pidgins consist largely of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with few or no articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns. As for grammar, early-stage pidgin discourse typically consists of short strings of words with little phrase construction, no regularity in word order, no subordinate clauses, and no inflectional endings on words. Together with that impoverishment, variability of speech within and between individuals is a hallmark of early-stage pidgins, which approximate an anarchic linguistic free-for-all.
Pidgins that are used only casually by adults who otherwise retain their own separate native languages persist at this rudimentary level. For example, a pidgin known as Russonorsk grew up to facilitate barter between Russian and Norwegian fishermen who encountered each other in the Arctic. That lingua franca persisted throughout the Nineteenth Century but never developed further, as it was used only to transact simple business during brief visits. Both those groups of fishermen spent most of their time speaking Russian or Norwegian with their compatriots. In New Guinea, on the other hand, the pidgin gradually became more regular and complex over many generations because it was used intensively on a daily basis, but most children of New Guinean workers continued to learn their parents' native languages as their first language until after the Second World War.
However, pidgins evolve rapidly into Creoles when a generation of one of the groups contributing to a pidgin begins to adopt the pidgin itself as its native language. That generation then finds itself using pidgin for all social purposes, not only for discussing plantation tasks or bartering. Compared to pidgins, Creoles have a larger vocabulary, much more complex grammar, and consistency within and between individuals. Creoles can express virtually any thought expressible in a normal language, whereas trying to say anything even slightly complex is a desperate struggle in pidgin. Somehow, without any equivalent of the Academic Francaise to lay down explicit rules, a pidgin expands and stabilizes to become a uniform and more sophisticated language. This process of creolization is a natural experiment in language evolution that has unfolded independently dozens of times in the modern world. The sites for the experiment have ranged from mainland South America and Africa to Pacific islands; the labourers, from Africans and Portuguese to Chinese and New Guineans; the dominant colonists, from English and Spaniards to other Africans and Portuguese; and the century, from at least the Seventeenth to the Twentieth. What is striking is that the linguistic outcomes of all these independent natural experiments share so many similarities, both in what they lack and in what they possess. On the negative side, Creoles are simpler than normal languages in that they usually lack conjugations of verbs for tense and person, declensions of nouns for case and number, most prepositions, distinctions between events in the past and present, and agreement of words for gender. On the positive side, Creoles are advanced over pidgins in many respects: consistent word order; singular and plural pronouns for the first, second, and third persons; relative clauses; indications of the anterior tense (describing actions occurring before the time under discussion, whether or not that time is the present); and particles or auxiliary verbs preceding the main verb and indicating negation, anterior tense, conditional mood, and continuing as opposed to completed actions. Furthermore, most Creoles agree in placing a sentence's subject, verb, and object in that particular order, and also agree in the order of particles or auxiliaries preceding the main verb.