Tok Pisin, an English-based Creole, is natively spoken by around 130,000 people and millions more as a second language in Papua New Guinea, where it serves as one of the official languages. Using the Latin alphabet, it is an analytic language with subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. Tok Pisin is an accessible lingua franca, uniting Papua New Guinea’s diverse linguistic communities and serving as a medium for education, media, and daily communication.
Stats
Language Family: English Creole
Writing System: Latin
Writing System Type: Alphabet
Writing Direction: Left to Right
Tones / Pitch Accent: None
Morphology: Analytic
Cases: 0
Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: None
Number of Verb Tenses: 5
Word Order: Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)
Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 5
Number of Consonants: 18
Areas Where Spoken
Papua New Guinea (official) (1.10%) (130 k)
Resources
Books
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED401761.pdf - Tok Pisin Grammar Book
Dictionary
https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/54270 Tok Pisin Dictionary
Lessons
https://unilang.org/course.php?res=80 Crash Course in Tok Pisin
Phrasebooks
Radio
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCau_6QfTRE_VFd0lZVgjZmA Tok Pisin Radio Archive
Websites
https://www.sil.org/system/files/reapdata/35/38/20/35382077130144193206541887510899690707/silewp2006_004.pdf Tok Pisin Idioms
https://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/definitions/tokpisin.html#vocab-hce Vocabulary in Tok Pisin
https://tpi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_pes Wikipedia in Tok Pisin