Introduction

Britain's three and a half centuries of imperialism spread not just varieties of standard and regional English but also resulted in the creation of more English lexicon pidgins and creoles than any other language. The aim of this chapter is to document the origins and nature of the English input to the pidgins and creoles in the Pacific with lexical affiliation to English. For simplicity's sake, I adopt the following definitions of the terms ‘pidgin’ and ‘creole’, although they are not without controversy (see Romaine 1988 for more detailed discussion). A pidgin is a contact variety restricted in form and function and native to no one, which is formed by members of at least two (and usually more) groups of different linguistic backgrounds. A creole is a nativised pidgin, expanded in form and function to meet the communicative needs of a community of native speakers.

By the time Captain James Cook died in the Hawaiian islands in 1779, Europeans had ‘discovered’ virtually all of the major islands in the Pacific and fixed their locations on maps. This marked the end of an age of exploration and discovery and the beginning of an era of commercial exploitation, missionisation and colonisation. In 1788 the first English settlement was established at Port Jackson, New South Wales, and whalers entered Pacific waters from Cape Horn. In 1797 the London Missionary Society began work in Tahiti.