Tok

I can't speak Tok Pisin well.

Papua New Guinea is called "Papua Niugini" in Tok Pisin.

The children of the English language are creoles like Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea. They could further development. If there would be a big war, people could become isolated and new pidgins and creoles would form from English.

The ISO 639-3 code for Toki Pona is "tok."

I read the article "Grammaticalization in Tok Pisin."

I wonder what would have been, if administrators had chosen Chabacano, Philippine Creole Spanish, as an official language in the Philippines, much as administrators had chosen Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, as an official language in Papua New Guinea. Today, Filipinos wax nostalgic and poetic of the bygone Hispanic Era. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Puerto Rico retained Spanish, but not the Philippines. Like an effervescent pink drink, English is now the main written language in the Philippines. However, the de facto aural-oral lingua franca in the archipelago is Taglish, the patois of code-switching between the two official languages, Filipino (Tagalog essentially) and English. Chabacano (Chavacano) combines Spanish with native elements. There is in Chabacano no verbal conjugation that does exist in Spanish, Tagalog, and English, which complicates these languages. Native languages in the Philippines have oodles of Spanish-derived words embedded in them. Native languages are of the Austronesian family, said to have originated thousands of years ago in Taiwan. About 200 languages exist in the Philippines. Most of them are of the Austronesian family, whilst Chabacano, an outgrowth of Hispanic colonization, sprouted like mushrooms in various places there.

It would have been interesting if the Philippines had instead opted to officialize Chabacano, instead of Tagalog, as Papua New Guinea had officialized Tok Pisin, an English-based creole. Chabacano (Chavacano) is Philippine Creole Spanish.

There are not many people who know how to speak Tok Pisin.

Everyone in Papua New Guinea knows how to speak Tok Pisin.

Do you speak Tok Pisin?