Sapos iumi mitim iumi : urbanization and creolization in the Solomon Islands

Abstract

Solcmon Islands Pijin, the least well documented dialect of Melanesian Pidgin, has been for a century a second and secondary language, a lingua franca of piantations and administration. As with Tok Pisin and Bislama, Pijin has long been expanded and stabilized to a degree far beyond the pidgins whose transformation into creoles has become a focus of universalist grammatical theory. The thesis argues that Pijin, like Tok Pisin and Bislama, is undergoinq creolization. But this, it is proposed, is not primarily a process of nativization, whereby Pijin is becoming the mother tongue of monolingual speakers. It is a concomitant of urbanization, particularly in Honiara, where Pijin has become the main language for a substantial stable population. Urban life creates a set of conditions, for which I introduce the term "creolicity", which provide the context in which a secondary lingua franca becomes the main language of a community. Under conditions of creolicity, the first generation of speakers for whom such a pidgin becomes the primary linguistic medium of everyday life. comprises adults who learned it non-natively. The emergence of nativization, in the generation of their children, is a natural concomitant of this change but I propose that it is not in itself the primary criterion of creolization, which must be defined in social and functional terms. Comparing the linguistic forms produced by rural and urban speakers, and by urban adults and children (both monolingual and bilingual), the thesis discusses what changes are initiated by adults for whom Pijin has become the primary language, and what changes emanate from the""nativizing" generation.