Raus! From German command to Tok Pisin verb: on the linguistic consequences of colonial encounters

Public Lecture

This presentation will examine Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, a language which emerged from contact between European colonizers and indigenous and enslaved peoples. While Tok Pisin is primarily English-based, it contains many words that date to the German colonial period in the South Pacific (1880s to 1914) and that can be understood as traces of commands, slurs and terms of abuse (Mühlhäusler 1975, 2003). One prominent example is rausim 'throw out, dismiss; get out!; get lost!' (Mühlhäusler, Dutton and Romaine 2003), which has a fraught history as a marker of social exclusion and discrimination (e.g. Angermeyer 2017: 163).

 Building on comparisons with plantation creoles of the Caribbean and contemporary Arabic-based pidgins (e.g. Bizri 2010), I examine how such features can be viewed as characteristic of so-called Pidgins and Creoles more generally, and how they reflect racist ideologies in which colonial subjects were treated as child-like or subhuman (compare DeGraff 2005). While such forms betray their origins in hierarchical and abusive communication, even hate speech, they also point to the agency of subordinated speakers to counter-appropriate and resignify offensive speech (Butler 1997), illustrating how the emergence of new languages can represent an act of re-appropriation.

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