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Pidgin English as a new simple world language |
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Score
76%
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174 votes,
Feasibility
0%
Originality
0%
Humour
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Ken Campbell proposes that Wol Wantok, the pidgin English spoken in several of the islands of the South Pacific, become a new world language for use by tourists and others - a language that will be simpler to learn than Esperanto.
'You can learn it in about two days, because it's got no tenses, no subjunctive, only two prepositions and no verb "to be" and no grammar'
"You can learn it in about two days," says Ken Campbell, "because it's got no tenses, no subjunctive, only two prepositions and no verb 'to be' and no grammar. You're up and running with 250 words.
"When I was in Poland I couldn't do anything without a translator. I couldn't just brush up my Polish in two days, and nor could they brush up their English. But if we'd have learned Wol Wantok, we'd be up and running.
"I like the speed, the notion that anyone can come in and we can immediately start having a chat. The language is really attractive, it's kind of humorous for a bit and then it's gripping." Prince Charles, for instance, translates as 'Namawan pikinini blong Kwin' (Number one pickanninny belong Queen).
In the 1860s, the British built a compound at the North Queensland Sugar Plantation in Australia. Workers were forcibly gathered from the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands and from all the way up to Papua New Guinea. These slaves, who all spoke a different language, adopted the Irish they heard from their overseers.
The slaves were sometimes released back to islands that were not their own, so their pidgin English spread as a common language through an island chain of 50 million people.
'This is my millennium mission, you could have a world language by Thursday week'
"This is my millennium mission," says Campbell, "you could have a world language by Thursday week."
Ken Campbell, 74 Watermint Quay, Craven Walk, London N16 6DD, UK
Ken Campbell, who translated Macbeth into pidgin English for performance at venues such as the Piccadilly Theatre in London, wants everyone to adopt this simple second language. Summarised from an interview with Ken Campbell by Nigel Berman in New Insight. This project won the Communications Social Innovations Award 1999.
A correcting comment
Summarised from an e-mail to the Institute from Mikael Parkvall.
Mikael Parkvall, from the Linguistics department at Stockholm University, writes that the statement in the item above about Melanesian Pidgin English having no grammar is "complete nonsense". There are correct and incorrect ways of speaking the language, as there are with all languages. In fact, linguistic experts around the world (including Mr. Parkvall) are writing theses on the grammars of different pidgin and creole languages: this would be more than difficult if these languages actually had no grammar.
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