Bislama: phonetics and phonology

Historical and cultural background

Bislama is an English-lexifier contact language spoken in Vanuatu in the southwest Pacific which initially developed as a distinct variety over about half a century between the mid-1800s and the end of the nineteenth century. The earliest developments in the history of Bislama took place outside of Vanuatu, which was then known as the New Hebrides. Soon after the establishment of the British colony of New South Wales in 1788, a pidgin developed which was used between settlers and Aboriginal peoples along the ever-expanding frontier (Baker 1993). Features of this pidgin made their way into what has often been referred to as South Seas Jargon, which was spoken by ships’ crews and individuals on shore in a wide variety of locations around the Pacific islands in the early 1800s (Clark 1979–1980; Keesing 1988).

Bislama first became established in southern Melanesia on trading stations established by Europeans in the southern islands of Vanuatu and the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia from around the mid-1800s (Crowley 1990: 60–65). Europeans were engaged in a three-way trade which involved sandalwood and sea slugs (or beche de mer) that were sold in China, tea from China that was sold in the Australian colonies, and iron, cloth and other trade goods from the colonies of eastern Australia that were traded for sandalwood and sea slugs in southern Melanesia. The European traders employed substantial numbers of people from a variety of different islands on their shore stations with the result that these stations were linguistically very mixed. The fairly unstable pre-existing South Seas Jargon, based largely on an English lexicon, quickly became the basis for a new variety of contact language used in association with these stations. This variety began to stabilize during the 1850s–1860s and acquired a number of local characteristics. Given its association with the sandalwood and beche de mer trades, it came to be known alternatively as Sandalwood English or Beche de Mer English. The name Sandalwood English was soon replaced completely by Beche de Mer English, which eventually became Bislama, the name by which the language is generally known in Vanuatu today.

These developments were further promoted by the widespread use of the contact language throughout the 1870s–1890s by Melanesian labourers on the sugar plantations of Queensland. The subsequent repatriation of most Vanuatu labourers after Queensland entered the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 ensured that knowledge of Bislama had become fairly widespread not only in the south but also in the central and northern islands of Vanuatu. However, while Bislama spread throughout Vanuatu during this era, it underwent contraction in the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia, and it was gradually replaced there as the lingua franca by French in the decades after France established itself as the colonial power in 1853 (Crowley 1990: 65–70).

It was not until 1906 that colonial government was established in Vanuatu, making the islands probably the last part of the world to be placed under colonial control. The system of government that was established was also unique in that the New Hebrides were jointly administered by Britain and France as a “condominium”. A local plantation economy was established during this period which further encouraged the spread of Bislama throughout the entire archipelago, as this promoted internal population movement. The language underwent a variety of lexical and structural developments, to the point where it had come to acquire the basic features that we find in Bislama today by the second quarter of the twentieth century. Contact with both English and French on these plantations – as many of the plantations were in fact French-owned – provided a point of contrast in the development of Bislama with the mutually intelligible varieties of Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Solomon Islands (where it is known as Pijin) and Papua New Guinea (where it is known as Tok Pisin).

The traditional animist religions of Vanuatu have for the most part been replaced by, or perhaps merged with, introduced Christianity. However, people continue to live for the most part in small rural villages and are dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. The Melanesian speakers of Bislama are culturally and physically quite different from the indigenous people of Australia to the west, as well as being quite different from their Polynesian neighbors to the east. However, the Melanesian people of Vanuatu exhibit many cultural and physical similarities with their Melanesian neighbors in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to the north and northwest, as well as with the indigenous people of New Caledonia to the south.

One major point of linguistic similarity between Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea relates to the continued use of different varieties of Melanesian Pidgin in the three countries. Intensive contact between people from the three countries ceased with the end of recruiting to the sugar plantations of Queensland after the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. With more than a century of independent development since then each variety has acquired a number of distinctive features. For part of this period, speakers of Tok Pisin in German New Guinea were exposed to German and there has been some lexical influence from this language which is absent in both Bislama and Solomons Pijin. Mention has already been made of contact with French in Vanuatu which has resulted in a significant input of French vocabulary that we do not find in the other two national varieties. Finally, of course, the different vernaculars in the three countries have each contributed a certain amount of vocabulary from local sources.