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Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strat egies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strategies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
Travel guides and travel reports constitute an important source for the generation and spread of popular geopolitical epistemes and assumptions. With regard to colonial attitudes and their possible perpetuation, it is therefore of great interest what kind of information such texts convey regarding (post)colonial places, and how they contextualize it. The paper compares descriptions of Qingdao (Tsingtau), a German colonized territory between 1897 and 1914, in travel guides and related material from colonial and postcolonial times and in different European languages. It investigates what differences can be found between these descriptions in relation to time, language, and medium (print or online) of publication. Of particular interest is the question whether, and in what ways, colonial perspectives are perpetuated in present-day (especially German) travel literature.
In the lexicon of pidgin and creole languages we can see an important part of these languages’ history of origin and of language contact. The current paper deals with the lexical sources of Tok Pisin and, more specifically, with words of German origin found in this language. During the period of German colonial domination of New Guinea and a number of insular territories in the Pacific (ca. 1885–1915), German words entered the emerging Tok Pisin lexicon. Based on a broad range of lexical and lexicographic data from the early 20th century up until today, we investigate the actual or presumed German origin of a number of Tok Pisin words and trace different lexical processes of integration that are linked to various, often though not always colonially determined, contact settings and sociocultural interactions.