Papua New Guinea
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Milne Bay English
I am currently writing a book chapter about the history of English and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. I have found that one speech variety that has been quite neglected by linguists is Milne Bay English, spoken in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. It is the major lingua franca in the province and spoken by a number of people, mainly of mixed parentage, as a home language. The sociolinguistic environment is similar to Hawaiʻi Creole English (hwc, aka Hawaiʻi Pidgin) in that there is a wide spectrum of uses, from a basilect that is only partially intelligible for English speakers to an acrolect that is a close approximation of standard Papua New Guinea English. The grammar is heavily influenced by the Austronesian languages of coastal and island Milne Bay Province. I believe it may be descended at least in part from the Papuan Pidgin English spoken in Milne Bay before World War II. The only detailed description is: YARUPAWA, Shem (1986). “Milne Bay informal variety of English”. Department of Language and Communication Studies Research, Report no. 9. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea. I can send you a copy of this hard-to-find publication, if you wish. Please consider listing Milne Bay English as a language of Papua New Guinea.
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Papuan Pidgin English
I am currently writing a book chapter about the history of English and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and have noticed that Papuan Pidgin English is not listed in Ethnologue. This is a pidgin language descended from Melanesian Pidgin English like Tok Pisin, Bislama, Solomons Pijin and Torres Strait Creole and like them, was probably mutually comprehensible to a large extent. It is described in the following two publications: Avram, Andrei 2020. Some notes on Papuan Pidgin English. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 38: 124–147. https://www.langlxmelanesia.com/Andrei%20A.%20Avram_Notes%20on%20PPE_LLM.... Last accessed 22 March 2021. Landtman, Gunnar 1918. The Pidgin-English of British New Guinea. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 19(7/8): 62–74. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43340160. Last accessed 14 March 2021. It became extinct at the outbreak of World War II. Its heyday seems to have been in the first three decades of the twentieth century as blackbirded workers were repatriated from plantations in Queensland (and possibly Fiji) where the original Melanesian Pidgin English had been used. I don't know how far Ethnologue likes to go back with extinct languages, but I notice that in the listings for Australia, there is a listing for Broome Pearl Lugger Pidgin, which had a similar timeline and sociolinguistic setting as well as for several Aboriginal languages such as Bunganditj that became extinct in the 1800s. For reasons of comparative and historical studies between the daughter dialects of Melanesian Pidgin English (Tok Pisin, Bislama, Solomons Pijin, Torres Strait Creole, and Papuan Pidgin English), I suggest that it would be useful to have a listing and ISO code for Papuan Pidgin English.
No action taken.