Simple English in the South Seas Evangelical Mission

The general point of this paper is to highlight the important role of Christian missions in the development of language planning. We document this with a case study: the attempt of the South Seas Evangelical Mission to devise a simplified English, intermediate between Pidgin English and full Standard English for their mission work in the south west Pacific. The relatively unsophisticated approach to corpus planning by this body is contrasted with Ogden’s more elaborate proposals for Basic English.