Midwifery: Bislama!

This weekend a friend shared a book written in Hawaiian Pidgin, which got me thinking about Bislama, the pidgin language spoken in Vanuatu, where our school sends midwifery students for preceptorship. Since I'm hoping to go there myself (... in three years), the weekend before midterms seemed like the perfect time to start learning the language! Thanks to photos from last year's midwifery students, I know that "titi blong mama is mos bes" container for milk. Or that a diaper is a "napkin blong baby."

Pidgins are linguistic mash-ups between native languages and whatever imperialistic language settled on top of them, where the two peoples need to communicate but don't have a common language. In Vanuatu French and English contributed, and Bislama is actually the official national language (as opposed to other places, like Hawaii, where the pidgin/creole is considered more of a "low"/common language). Pidgins have their own grammars apart from the language that contributed the vocabulary. From my few hours of reading, I can confirm that both Hawaiian Pidgin and Bislama have different grammars from English, even though English contributed the bulk of both of their vocabularies. Both are technically creoles, since children learn them as a primary language. Or maybe just Pidgin is a creole. I'm new to this.

Anyway, both languages are fun to read and speak aloud, because they have enough words familiar that they're comprehensible, but they're different enough to trip you up. This is my tendency in almost all the languages I ostensibly speak (French, Dutch, Hebrew), since my comprehension always outstrips my ability to generate speech or be good about grammar. For example, because most word roots are in common with French (via Latin), I can read Spanish in a very limited way but can't string together more than one or two words. Dutch has lots of common roots with English. Likewise, I can understand "Da Jesus Book" with probably 95% accuracy (in no small part thanks to the movie Lilo and Stitch) but I definitely can't speak Bislama. Not yet, anyway!