ABSTRACT
Something like a thousand different languages are spaken on the large island of New Guinea: almost every valley has its own distinct language. For millennia, the inhabitants coped with this diversity simply by learning their neighbours' languages. Every New Guinean routinely learned to speak four or five languages while growing up: the language of the local community and the languages of the nearest neighbours. Such multilingualism was accepted as anormal part of everyone's life in a way that would stupefy a British school pupil struggling to get to grips with a single foreign language. When Europeans began to settle New Guinea in the eighteenth century, however, something else happened. Under urgent pressure to communicate, the European settlers and the original inhabitants began to piece together a kind of crude but serviceable linguistic system. Bits of grammar and vocabulary were taken from several local languages and from whichever European language was locally important: Dutch, English or German. The resulting system in each area was what we call a PIDGIN: a reduced language stitched together from bits and pie ces of other languages, showing a good deal of variation, with a limited capacity for expression. These pidgins allowed people to communicate in a clumsy but effective way.
