Documenting Three Pacific Creoles
The wider Pacific is home to hundreds of languages, that reflect the multiple expansions of humans into the region. However, the increasing connectivity across linguistic borders has seen the rise in lingua franca within states across the region. Three languages have seen particularly rapid expansion: Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Island Pijin in the Solomon Islands, and Bislama, in Vanuatu.
Each of the languages have spread quickly across many linguistic boundaries, creating new and large second-language speaker populations, and are increasingly becoming first-languages within their home states. Tok Pisin has between 3–5 million speakers, including 500,000 first language speakers, over 300,000 Solomon Island Pijin speakers (~25,000 first-language speakers), while around 318,000 Ni-Vanuatu speak Bislama.
This project will build large corpora for each of the languages, creating a platform for a significant expansion of linguistic research in this region, including research in the sociophonetic variation across the region, and the creation of language tools such as forced alignment and automatic translation.
This project is led by the team of Danielle Barth, Bethwyn Evans, Nicholas Evans, and Nick Theiberger, supported by the post-doctoral team of Lila San-Roque, Kirsty Gillespie, and myself, and research assistants Kira Davey, Saurabh Nath, and Keria Mullan.
This research is supported by the Commonwealth of Australia.
Publications
Sam Passmore, Lila San Roque, Kirsty Gillespie, Saurabh Nath, Kira Davey, Keira Mullan, Tim Cawley, Jennifer Biggs, Rosey Billington, Bethwyn Evans, Nick Thieberger, and Danielle Barth. 2025. English-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two English-based Pacific Creoles. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31172–31183, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Publicly Available Datasets
Tok Pisin: https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/3PAC1
Solomon Island Pijin: https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/3PAC2