A little over 40 years ago I had major surgery that required 6 weeks convalescence.  I was told not to climb stairs or even walk very much (now for the same surgery they get you up and walking immediately).  I spent my time reviving a hobby from when I was a kid, shortwave DXing, listening to broadcasts from a long way off.  DXers note the content and time and write to the chief engineer, and if lucky, get a postcard from the station.  They were called QAL cards.   As a kid I had a map and a wall full of cards.  Now anyone can listen to any station online but then it was quite a thrill to hear distant voices.

One of my favorite catches, one I could get in Sitka almost every night, was Radio Happy Isles, run by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation.  It was also called Radio Honiara.  I was intrigued by the language.  I could almost understand it.  It was in a language they called, at the time, neo-Melanesian, I thought of it as Pidgin English.  Now in the Solomon Islands it’s called Pijin, or Soloman Island’s Pidgin.  It is the “lingua franca” (I suppose I should say “lingua anglais”) of the islands of the region.  I enjoyed listening because I had to work to understand it but often I could.  I especially enjoyed ads in the language, sometimes the turns of phrase were unintentionally too truthful.  While music and entertainment were in Pisin, the news was in very proper English.  (Although according to their website they now do news in Pisin as well as English.)

The name “Happy Isles” was taken from a line in Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.”  “It may be we shall touch the happy isles.”  It was used as a title of a book about the Solomon Islands written in 1966 by DC Horton.  It was suggested by a VSA (A New Zealand version of Peace Corps) volunteer in 1976 and was adopted by the station a couple of years later.

The Melanesian islands are language rich, some of the greatest linguistic diversity in the world.  Pidgin is a simplified language that was used for trade and developed, specifically, when workers from different Melanesian islands were impressed into work on sugar and copra plantations by colonial powers.  Often, they were lured with promises of wages and conditions that were, to be kind, exaggerated.  Much of the time workers were simply shanghaied.  This practice was called “Blackbirding” and started with the end of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s and continued until this form of “neo-slavery” was banned in 1904.  Workers from different islands or even different valleys on the same island spoke different languages. Pidgin evolved so they could talk with each other and with their “employers.”

Pidgin was based on English but had words in French, German, Malay, Portuguese, and some Dutch, depending on where the workers were and the colonial masters of the region.  Many universally used nautical terms made it into the language.  Some of the grammatical structure is based on indigenous languages.  Pidgin is a Chinese word for “business.”  Pidgin English is “Business English.”  Pidgin being a Chinese word was prescient.  Now Chinese businessmen are all over the region.  As one woman in Papua New Guinea (PNG) said to me “All roads lead to China.”

Neo Melanesian languages are different in most of the islands but mutually understandable.  In PNG it is called Tok Pisin, in the Solomin Islands, Pisin or Soloman Islands Pidgin, in Vanuatu it is called Bislama and in Northern Queensland Australia it is called Torres Strait Creole.  

In Vanuatu many signs were in Bislama because of the mixed history of English and French colonialization and today’s dual education system.  On other islands business and government signs were in English because that is the main language of instruction.  But in the home neo-Melanesian languages are becoming more commonly spoken as folks from different regions or islands move to the city and marry each other.  Their common language is Pidgin.  Linguists say that the emergence of Pisin as a first language taught to toddler in the home, indicate the language is strengthening rather than being taken over by English.   It is taught in many schools alongside English.  One teacher told me PNG starts English in Kindergarten to make it easier for kids to learn.  Tok Pisin’s spelling is phonetic so there are several Roman letters that are not in the Pisin alphabet.  No C because you can use either a K or an S, no J no Q (“Kwin” is “queen”), no X and no Z. 

Here are two signs in a Vanuatu museum, side by side, in English and Bislama so you can see how Pidgin English evolved into its own language.

In the meantime, the SIBC continues to broadcast in both Pisin and English to reach its listeners in remote areas and talk to neighbors in other nearby countries who speak a variant of “Business English”