In a variety of ways, the position of Tok Pisin is like that of many other pidgin and creole languages elsewhere and it has a number of advantages as a source of data, as it is one of the best documented contact languages, however, “Tok Pisin is somewhat unusual among the Pidgins of the world in its gradual development over several generations as a second language before any extensive creolization took place.” (Smith 2002: 6). There are many reasons why the position of Tok Pisin, one of the two national languages of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea (with Hiri Motu as the other and alongside English as the official language), stands in the continued focus of scholarly attention. With this, the area of the Pacific and Indian Ocean has become increasingly significant for linguists. They have not merely been studied for their own sake, but for the relevance to such concerns as language contact and change, historical linguistics, language learning, first and second language acquisition or language universals (cf.

For many years the study of Pidgin and Creole languages was widely regarded as marginal or frivolous, but recently, there has been growing interest in the study of these languages all over the world.

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