Pijin, the lingua franca of Solomon Islands, has acquired the functions of a creole in the capital city of Honiara. Yet, though Pijin is the common language of the urban culture of Honiara, it lacks linguistic legitimacy. Speakers of Pijin did not, until recently, consider it a true language in… read more
The paper takes a cultural approach to the study of creolization and argues that the expansion of Pijin as the lingua franca of the Solomon Islands was curtailed, during the greater part of its social history (1) by the fact that most adults were bilingual or multilingual and (2) that Pijin was not… read more
In Honiara, capital city of the Solomon Islands, speakers of the local variety of Pijin are making extensive usage of the transitive suffix -em (and its variants -im and -um) to transform prepositions into prepositional verbs: daon /down/ becomes daonem /to lower/; ap /up/ becomes apum /to raise/;… read more
In Honiara, Solomon Islands, 64 vernacular languages coexist with Pijin, the lingua franca and linguistic cement of the town, and with English, the former colonial language. The chapter shows how the modalities of urban linguistic repertoires vary with different phases of Honiara’s transformation… read more