Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Pidgin Hindustani is a restricted pidgin that, along with Pidgin Fijian, is used for inter-ethnic communication in Fiji.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

Fiji is a group of 300 islands in the southwest Pacific on the border of the cultural areas of Melanesia and Polynesia. The Fijian language, spoken throughout the group, consists of many dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible. However, one particular variety of the language – today known as Standard Fijian – has served as the lingua franca among the indigenous population.

     Fijians first had extensive contact with Europeans in the early 1800s, initially with shipwrecked sailors and then with people involved in the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (sea slug) trades. Since the Fijians remained firmly in control of their islands, long term visitors and residents learned their language (the Fijian lingua franca) to communicate with them. Wesleyan missionaries arrived in 1835, followed by European settlers, who started small plantations in the late 1850s. The first plantation labourers were Fijians, and the language used to run the plantations was Fijian or various “simplified” versions of Fijian spoken by Europeans.

     In 1864 indentured labourers began to be imported from other parts of the Pacific – mainly the islands that make up the current countries of Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Kiribati. Fijian (most often simplified or pidginized Fijian) continued to be used as the plantation language and it also became the lingua franca among the Pacific Islanders themselves, who spoke dozens of different Oceanic languages. This wider use of pidginized forms of Fijian soon led to the emergence of a stable Pidgin Fijian.

     Fiji became a British colony in 1874, and in 1879 the colonial government began to import indentured labourers from North India. They came mostly from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and spoke various regional dialects of Eastern Hindi. The majority also had some familiarity with Hindustani, the lingua franca of North India, based on Khariboli, a dialect of Western Hindi. (The term Hindustani, as opposed to Hindi, refers to the varieties used in common speech.) Most of the first Indian labourers worked on small plantations along with Pacific Islanders and learned Pidgin Fijian. But soon the Colonial Sugar Refining Company established larger sugar cane plantations where the labour force was almost entirely Indian. Following the established practice in Fiji of not speaking English to the “natives”, the European overseers on the plantations were supposed to use Hindustani. However, most of the overseers did not know the language well, and therefore “simplified” Hindustani became the plantation language. Those labourers who were unfamiliar with Hindustani in India learned the pidginized versions of the overseers. After 1903, however, over 42% of the labourers were imported from South India. They spoke Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam) unrelated to Hindustani or the Hindi dialects of the North Indians. So they also learned the pidginized Hindustani used on the plantations, and it became the lingua franca among the Indian labourers themselves. This wider use of pidginized forms of Hindustani soon led to a stable Pidgin Hindustani.

     The importation of Pacific labour ended in 1911. Although over 27,000 Pacific Islanders had worked in Fiji, most returned home after their contracts. The small number who remained in Fiji assimilated into the Fijian community, and their descendants now speak Fijian. The importation of Indian labour ended in 1916. More than 60,000 Indian labourers had come to Fiji, but unlike the Pacific Islanders, a large proportion remained in the country. Their descendants, both North Indian and South Indian, now speak Fiji Hindi, an immigrant koine based mainly on the dialects of Eastern Hindi that were the mother tongues of the majority of labourers, with some minor influence from Pidgin Hindustani. However, both Pidgin Fijian and Pidgin Hindustani have survived with a new function: a vehicle for inter-ethnic communication.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

According to the 2007 census, the population of Fiji was 837,271. Fijians (the name used for the indigenous population only) made up 56.8%, Fiji Indians (or Indo-Fijians) 37.5%, and other groups (including Europeans, people of mixed race, other Pacific Islanders and Chinese) 5.7%. Today either Pidgin Fijian or Pidgin Hindustani can be heard in many interactions between Fijians and Indians, primarily on the main islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu where large numbers of the two groups live near each other. Many Chinese people also speak Pidgin Hindustani to Indians. Thus, both Pidgins are still widely used, although they are gradually being displaced by Fiji English – especially in the capital, Suva, and other urban centres.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

The phonology of Pidgin Hindustani represented here is that of Fijian speakers. It is similar to that of Fijian, except that the voiced stops are not prenasalized, and there is no distinction in vowel length. Indian speakers generally make further distinctions, as found in Fiji Hindi – e.g. /ʌ/ vs. /a/ and retroflex vs. dental stops. The symbols used in Tables 1 and 2 are those used to represent the phonemes of the language in the examples below.

5. Noun Phrase ⇫ ¶

Pidgin Hindustani, like Fiji Hindi, has no articles. It has the same two demonstratives as Fiji Hindi: i ‘this’ (example 3) and u ‘that’ (example 2), which are also the 3sg proximate and remote pronouns. Plural is generally not marked, but log (or the variants loŋ or lon) ‘people’ can follow animate nouns to indicate plural. This same form is added to singular pronouns to form the plural. Objective and possessive forms also exist (the same form being used for both adnominal and pronominal possessives). These are generally marked with the postposition ke, but this follows a special oblique stem (is-, us-) in the 3sg. There are no separate independent pronoun forms. This pronoun system is the same as that of Fiji Hindi except for the absence of honorific forms and the use of regularized 1sg and 2sg objective forms (ham ke and tum ke) rather than the distinct forms (hame and tume). Also, the 3sg pronoun is not normally used for inanimates; rather i ciz or u ciz ‘this thing’ or ‘that thing’.

In possession, the possessor precedes the possessum, and the postposition ke is also used for full noun possessors:

(1)Daya    ke        kutta   

       Daya     poss    dog     

       ‘Daya’s dog’

There is only one derivational suffix in Pidgin Hindustani:  -wala on demonstratives (e.g. i-wala ‘this’) and adjectives (see example 2), but it is not clear if it is productive. (This suffix is a nominalizer in Fiji Hindi.)

6. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

In Fiji Hindi, there are many verbal suffixes for indexing the subject and marking tense, aspect, and infinitives. In Pidgin Hindustani, these are generalized to just -o, the imperative suffix, which is fused to the stem:

(3)  ham  deko  tum sangesange    i        larika       sangesange     ao

       1sg    see    2sg together  this guy   together   come

       mango kojo            kon     admi jano            Hindustani bat

       want   find            who    man  know         Hindustani talk

  ‘I saw you coming with this guy, wanting to find    

   someone who knows Hindustani.’

There are no grammaticalized tense or aspect markers in Pidgin Hindustani; time relations are expressed with adverbs, such as pice ‘behind’ (= ‘later’), bihan ‘tomorrow’, abi ‘now’. Many such expressions incorporate the loanword taim from English (i.e. time) – e.g. u taim ‘(at) that time’, sab taim ‘all the time’. Pidgin Hindustani also uses the word kalas ‘finished’ to indicate the end of an action or state:

(4)  ham-log   suar  maro kalas

       1-pl         pig    kill    finished

       ‘We killed a pig.’

Two preverbal modals exist: mango ‘want, like’ (desiderative) (see example (3)), and sako ‘can’ (abilitative, permissive):

(5)  ham    sako  jao

       1sg can   go

       ‘I can go.’

The modal mango is also used to express obligation:

(6)nai         mango     dusra     taim  ao

       neg      want        another time  come

       ‘You shouldn’t come again.’

Pidgin Hindustani uses the postural verb baito ‘sit’ as a copula for locational, existential, and equational sentences:

(7)  peti    hiya  baito

       belt   here  cop

       ‘The belt was here.’

(8)  u          nas      baito

       3sg      nurse  cop

       ‘She’s a nurse.’

The copula baito is also used in ‘have’ possessive constructions:

(9)  uske           ek      motar     baito

       3sg.poss    one   motor    cop

       ‘He has an outboard motor.’

7. Adpositional phrase ⇫ ¶

Adpositional phrases are generally avoided in Pidgin Hindustani as in (10) and (11), but when they do occur, they follow Fiji Hindi in being postpositional, as in (12):

8. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

Pidgin Hindustani is generally verb-final and SOV if there is an object, following the most common ordering of Fiji Hindi (see example 4), but SVO also occurs, as it sometimes does in Fiji Hindi (example 14).

     Pidgin Hindustani has a general negative marker nai which precedes the verb:

Yes/no questions are indicated by intonation. For content questions, there is generally no change of word order or wh-movement. Some bimorphemic question words are used: konciz ‘what’ (kaun ‘what’, ciz ‘thing’), kon taim [what time] ‘when’, and kakaro ‘why’ (ka ‘what’, karo ‘do’). Other question words are kon ‘who, which’, kaha ‘where’, kaise ‘how’ and kitna ‘how much/many’.

9. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

Clausal coordination occurs with or ‘and’ and baki ‘but’. Subordination is mostly unmarked. There are no complementizers and adverbs are often used to indicate relationships between clauses. For example, sait ‘perhaps’ is used to introduce conditional or counterfactual clauses:

With regard to temporal clauses, however, tab ‘then’ is used, as well as relative constructions such as jon taim ‘when, at the time’ and jon roj ‘the day that…’ – for example:

(16)   jon       roj     tum-loko    ao,       tab         ham       batana 

         rel      day   2-pl            come   then       1sg        tell

       ‘The day that you come, I will tell [you].’

As can be seen from the preceding examples, most relative clauses in Pidgin Hindustani are correlative, as in Fiji Hindi, using the relative particle jon. Further examples follow:

(17)   jon    kempa u-lon   baito,   u         maila

         rel    camp  3-pl     cop     3sg      dirty

         ‘The camp that they stayed at was dirty.’

(18)   jon    tum-loko  age      baito    tum      jao       uske         lage   baito    

         rel    2-pl         front   sit        2sg      go        3sg.acc    side   sit   

         tum   gad        karo       uske

         2sg    guard    do          3sg.acc

          ‘Those of you who sit in front, sit by his side and guard him.’

In a few instances, jon is used as a relative pronoun in reductive relative constructions – e.g.:

(19)   tab    u         manki      jon      jano         [...]      u-loŋ  karo

         then  dem     monkey   rel      know       […]     3-pl   do

         ‘Then those monkeys that know […] (they) do it.’

10. Lexicon ⇫ ¶

The lexicon of Pidgin Hindustani consists of words mainly found in Fiji Hindi. However, it also has some words from Fijian and from English:

(20)  tukituki       ‘pound’ (Fijian ‘hammer’)

        caina           ‘banana’ (Fijian)

        sona            ‘anus’ (Fijian)

        nokaut            ‘really tired’ (English knocked out)

        pek                  ‘full to the brim’ (English packed)

Some reduplicated forms exist which are not found in Fiji Hindi, but reduplication is not a productive morphological process. In the following examples, the unreduplicated form is found in Fiji Hindi with the same or nearly the same meaning.

(21)  sangesange       ‘together’

         konciskoncis     ‘whatever’

         asteaste             ‘slowly’