Beschrijving

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies – Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen), course: Hauptseminar, language: English, abstract: For many years the study of Pidgin and Creole languages was widely regarded as marginal or frivolous, but recently, there has been growing interest in the study of these languages all over the world. They have not merely been studied for their own sake, but for the relevance to such concerns as language contact and change, historical linguistics, language learning, first and second language acquisition or language universals (cf. Smith 2002: 3). With this, the area of the Pacific and Indian Ocean has become increasingly significant for linguists. There are many reasons why the position of Tok Pisin, one of the two national languages of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea (with Hiri Motu as the other and alongside English as the official language), stands in the continued focus of scholarly attention. In a variety of ways, the position of Tok Pisin is like that of many other pidgin and creole languages elsewhere and it has a number of advantages as a source of data, as it is one of the best documented contact languages, however, \