Torres Strait Creole

Torres Strait Creole, also known as Torres Strait Pidgin, Brokan/Broken, Cape York Creole, Lockhart Creole, Kriol, Papuan, Broken English, Blaikman, Big Thap, Pizin, and Ailan Tok, is an English-based creole language spoken on several Torres Strait Islands of Queensland, Australia; Northern Cape York; and south-western coastal Papua New Guinea.
It has an estimated 20,000–30,000 mother-tongue and bi/tri-lingual speakers. It is widely used as a language of trade and commerce.

History

Records of pidgin English being used in Torres Strait exist from as early as the 1840s, and therefore Torres Strait Creole may very well be as old as, if not older, than its sister languages, and not a descendant of any of these. It was spread throughout the islands because many considered it to be English. The main importers of the pidgin were British and other sailors, many of whom were South Sea Islanders, both Melanesian and Polynesian, as well as Island South-East Asians, Jamaicans, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, and others. Therefore, Torres Strait Creole has various characteristics of these different types of Pidgin, the main ones being mid- to late 1800s Malay-area Pidgin English, Pacific Pidgin and Jamaican Patois. It may have creolised quite early on Darnley Island, and somewhat later at St Pauls on Moa and on Yorke Island in the Central Islands. Creolisation is post-1960s elsewhere.
The Papuan dialect was replaced by Hiri Motu in many parts of its former territory, which in turn is being replaced by Tok Pisin.

Dialects

Torres Strait Creole has six main dialects: Papuan, Western-Central, TI, Malay, Eastern, and Cape York. Its main characteristics show that it is a Pacific Pidgin, but the future in X go VERB aligns it with Atlantic Creoles. Related languages are Pijin of the Solomon Islands, Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea, and Bislama of Vanuatu. The other creoles of Australia are more distantly related, being descendants of the Pidgin English that developed in and around Sydney after the colonisation of Australia.
Dialects differ mainly from the influences in the various areas the language is spoken or by the language of the ethnic groups that use the language as well as a certain amount of superstrata influence from English. Apart from accent and intonation, differences are mainly vocabulary used for local fauna, flora and so on, retentions from local indigenous languages or other substrata languages and minor differences in pronunciation because of substrata influences.
The dialects group generally into the Western-Central-Cape York dialects where the western and central language of Torres Strait has a strong influence, 'TI' Brokan with a strong Malay/Indonesian-Filipino-European influence, Eastern Brokan with a South Seas and Meriam Mìr influence, and Papuan, with influences from languages such as Agöb, Bine, Gizrra, Wipi, Kiwai, Motu and Tok Pisin. Influences from other languages such as Japanese are to do with vocabulary specific to Japanese items.

Continuum

Torres Strait Creole exists as part of a lect continuum: a local language, a local language mix called Ap-ne-Ap, a pidgin basilect creole, a mesolect English influenced creole, local Torres Strait English, and General Australian English, as this example shows:

English: I'm really tired
Thursday Island English: I'm proper tired
Mesolect Brokan: Ai prapa taiad
Basilect Brokan: Ai mina taiad
Ap-ne-Ap: Ngai mina taiad mepa
Kalau Kawau Ya: ''Ngai mina gamukœubaasipa''
Speakers

The 2016 Australian census recorded 6,171 people who spoke Yumplatok at home, but linguists working on the language have estimated that from 20,000 to 30,000 Indigenous Australians spoke it as their first language in 2010. In 2007 a translation of the Bible was published, called the Holi Baibul, which was the first complete translation of the Bible into any Indigenous language within Australia.
Most Torres Strait Islander people speak Yumplatok in addition to their local languages, and a 2014 study suggests that the numbers of people speaking Kriol are growing. It is widely used as a language of trade and commerce.

Phonology

Vowels

The language has the following vowels :

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Open

Vowel length for the language as a whole is non-contrastive, though in some subdialects/dialects it appears to be contrastive.

Consonants

The dental-alveolar contrast exists in the Western, Central and Cape York dialects, however only exists in other dialects in so far as either English or Western-Central influences force a contrast, or where the voiced alveolar stop realises as the rhotic tap . In the Papuan dialects, the only alveolar consonant is, while and can be either dental or alveolar, according to local language. In Meriam influenced Broken, is dental, while is alveolar.
The stops,,,, and are aspirated and also have fricative allophones, particularly while and vary in pronunciation when word initial and medial between and, with only appearing at the ends of words in Torres Strait and Papuan dialects. These reflect indigenous language allophony as well as a rationalisation of the larger English consonant phoneme inventory. The consonants,,,,,, and do not have any major allophonic variation, while varies between.

Grammar

Pronouns

The following are the forms of the personal pronouns in the Western-Central-Cape York dialects. Where the Eastern dialect is concerned, the dental-alveolar contrast is on the whole non-operative, and the dual forms are less commonly used than elsewhere. Furthermore, the 1–2 form yumi is often used as the general non-singular 1–2 form; and is sometimes used as such in other dialects in rhetorical discourse. The Central Islands dialect tends to also use wi for the 1st person plural.

number	1st person	1st–2nd person	2nd person	3rd person	3rd person
singular subject	ai	—	yu	em	i
singular non-subject	mi	—	—	—	em
dual subject	mitu	yumi	yutu	dhemtu	–
dual object	—	—	—	dhemtu/-emtu	–
plural subject	mipla	yumpla	yupla	dhempla	òl
plural object	—	—	—	dhempla/-empla	dhempla/-empla

The non-identifying 3rd plural òl is also found as a nominal plural marker:

I gad òl bùk ianau 'There are books here'
Interrogatives and Demonstratives
this, these: full form dhiswan, colloquial form dhisan, reduced, clause initial form san, sa
that, those: full form dhaswan, colloquial form dhasan, reduced, clause initial form san, sa

There is a strong tendency for dhiswan and its forms to be used to the exclusion of dhaswan.

Who is that? Dhaswan i udhat?, Dhiswan dhe i udhat?, Dhasan i udhat?, Dhisan dhe i udhat?, Dhisan i udhat?, San i udhat?, San dhe i udhat?

Three interrogatives and the two deictics have two forms, this being a reduced clause initial form and a fuller clause final form, and in the case of the deictics, a pre-clitic and independent form, as in the following examples:

Wane yu luk? / Yu luk wanem? 'What do you see?'
Kenu i ya kam. / Kenu i kam iya. 'A canoe is coming this way.'

Clause position variation

what: wane, wanem
where: we, wea
who: udha, udhat

Pre-clitic vs independent form:

there: dhe, dhea
here: ya, iya

Two interrogatives have variant words/forms, used interchangeably:

when: wataim, wen
why: aukam, wanempò

Dialectal variation is only found in two forms:

how: wiswei; Central Islands: waswei
why, what's the matter: wasamada; Eastern-Papuan ''wasamara''
Articles

The language has no indefinite article, and uses the definite article much less than it is in English, it having a more demonstrative feel than the English equivalent. There are singular, dual and plural forms:

singular: dha — dha kenu 'the canoe'
dual: dhemtu, dhostu — dhemtu kenu, dhostu kenu 'the two canoes'
plural: dhem — dhem kenu 'the canoes'

The demonstrative articles have a general form, and a specific dual form, as well as variation, with a strong tendency to use the clitics iya and dhea to specify position; the definitie articles are often used with the demonstrative clitics to express the demonstrative articles:

this man: dhis man, dhis man ia
these men : dhistu man, dhistu man ia, dhemtu man ia
these men : òl dhis man, òl dhis man ia, dhem man ia
all these men: òlgedha man ia
that man: dhas/dhat man, dhis man dhea
those men : dhostu man, dhistu man dhea, dhemtu man dhea
those men : òl dhas/dhat man, òl dhis man dhea, dhem man dhea
all those men: ''òlgedha man dhea''