Pidgin Is Becoming
p. 13 · Read in the full issue
"Respectable"
PIDGIN English is becoming respectable (says a writer in “Far Eastern Survey,” published in New York).
It is now recognised as an indispensable lingua franca for the whole of Melanesia —over two million people in the western Pacific: for their native speech is mutually unintelligible from island to island.
Mortimer Graves, in a recent report, mentions the publication of a practical analytical grammar with texts and voca bulary by Robert A. Hall, Jr., and the initiation of courses in this language for Army and Navy personnel. Indeed, there is a special Army edition of the Phrase-Book and Vocabulary.
For others who wish to inform them selves in a more general way about the character of this Melanesian Pidgin Eng lish, there is an appendix on this subject in a new book on New Guinea published jointly by the Institute of Pacific Re lations and the American Philosophical Society. It is by Stephen Windsor Reed.
“The Making of Modern New Guinea,”
American Philosophical Society Memoirs, Vol. XVIII, 326 pp. The anpendix. “The Language Adjustment; Melanesian Pid gin,” is shortly to be issued separately as a pamphlet.
A meeting of Thursday Island resi dents. held in Brisbane recently, unani mously decided to form a Thursday Island Association, to act in their com mon interests.