Historical-sociolinguistic research on MPP first illustrates its nature as a large jigsaw puzzle – small pieces here and there to fit together into a big picture. There remain obvious gaps of information, while other data do not match fully. The documentation by James Cook and his crew members has mostly proved disappointing for sociolinguistic information in light of its overall historical significance, scope, and wealth. Linguistic data for the Pidgin have also remained comparatively meager for the Marquesas, if we claim Herman Melville's attestations in his semi-autobiographical novels of the Pacific to represent a Hawaiianized variety instead. Reliable documentation has altogether been missing for Rapanui (Easter Island). We would even expect more and better data in historical documentation for the Society Islands, the suggested original home of MPP, than presented here. What the Māori Moehanga illustrated in his chatterbox-like conversations for New Zealand of the early nineteenth century has so far met no replication – fairly systematic recordings by Pacific Islanders beyond isolated attestations recorded by Europeans – for different periods or for other Pacific archipelagos; historical attestations for other Pacific Islands have often remained limited and vague. Then again, the linguistically richest sources of data on MPP, Melville's Typee and Omoo, include but little extralinguistic information. Those linguistic records that coordinate with extralinguistic data rarely include much micro-sociolinguistic information, which suggests that most observers of the period lacked sufficient sensitivity to discern minute sociolinguistic differences. Attestations of MPP also appear to fizzle out for the second half of the nineteenth century, although it survived in the Hawaiian Islands into the early twentieth century (Roberts Reference Roberts1995a: 27–45; Reference Roberts2005: 58–125) and in Tahiti in the form of Parau Tinitō as recently as the 1970s (William H. Wilson, personal communication, 14 June 2002).

Notwithstanding these seemingly insurmountable shortcomings, philo-logical-ethnohistorical research on the early colonial Pacific offers quantitatively and qualitatively much richer data for MPP than for Pidgin English at the same time, and draws on several historical beacons:

1. the observations by Johann Reinhold Forster, official naturalist on James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific and apparently the first to recognize a general Polynesian-based lingua franca extending across much of the South Pacific, and his son George, who proposed universal principles for understanding it

2. James Colnett, British fur trader who, in spite of prejudices against Pacific Islanders, left us an exemplary paradigm of questions in MPP

3. Moehanga, a Māori chief, and his British friend John Savage, who early documented a fairly rich body of the Māori variety of MPP on their voyage to England

4. Adelbert von Chamisso, who, as a trained linguist, left us an observant description of MPP

5. Paul-Émile Botta, naturalist-surgeon, who offered a perceptive inventory of phonological distinctions and a description of sociolinguistic variations

6. Herman Melville, whose semi-autobiographical novels Typee and Omoo provide a comparatively rich inventory of MPP, although some questions remain about the origin of his data

7. Ralph Kuykendall, historian of the Hawaiian Islands, who already recognized Colnett's questions as a historical-linguistic problem, even if he did not have methodological or conceptual-theoretical means to resolve it

8. John E. Reinecke, Ross Clark, Derek Bickerton, William H. Wilson, and Sarah J. Roberts with original studies of Pidgin Hawaiian, Polynesian-based South Seas Jargon, and Pidgin Māori, presented here as part of regional MPP.

There undoubtedly are others yet to step forth from the shadow of history. For a balance, we should welcome more exemplary native sources such as Moehanga's for other Pacific archipelagos and eras.

There remains the nagging question of why historical research has not produced a broader, richer set of attestations for MPP. The answer actually is fairly straightforward: First, most early observers, as exemplified by the Forsters’, Chamisso's, and Kuykendall's interpretations, lacked the conceptual tools to recognize MPP as distinct from Central Eastern Polynesian languages. These languages exhibited considerable structural transparency regarding their fairly analytic morphosyntactic pattern, which made them structurally less different from the Pidgin than synthetic or polysynthetic languages. In addition, as Polynesian languages, they displayed comparatively little linguistic diversity, thus fewer structural contrasts among themselves in comparison to areas of high linguistic diversity. Had MPP existed in an area with great linguistic diversity and in an environment of languages with less morphological transparency (like Chinook Jargon in northwestern North America), it would have been more easily identifiable by mere linguistic contrast. The Pidgin would accordingly have attracted greater attention from earlier observers for its obvious sociolinguistic advantages and might even have flaunted a name that speakers apparently failed to record for the regional unit. Secondly, when Europeans and Americans finally came to recognize MPP as structurally and functionally distinct from lexically related vernaculars, they evidently presented it as no more than a linguistic aberration. In short, MPP mirrored European attitudes towards Pidgin English instead of reflecting what it really was – a useful regional medium for interlingual communication in the eastern Pacific.

Although this study cannot make any claims to an exhaustive coverage, it demonstrates the feasibility of a combined philological-ethnohistorical approach in the Pacific. It does so by drawing on multiple sources and on a systematic scale, but – unlike my earlier study of another non-European pidgin, Mobilian Jargon (Drechsel Reference Drechsel1996b, Reference Drechsel1997) – without any access to fieldwork as a resource for the descriptive-analytical confirmation of historical data. Although early documents by themselves do not constitute reliable sources for historical-sociolinguistic research as outlined here, they accumulate to a sufficiently diverse database in combination, which reveals distinct structural patterns, contrasted and confirmed by philological reconstitution with comparative data from the Pidgin's source languages. Such a systematic body of internal and external data discloses significant structural consistency, leaving little doubt about the accuracy of most historical attestations and permitting a composite portrait of early language contact in the eastern Pacific. Similarly, historical attestations exhibit extralinguistic patterns, although primarily at a macro-sociolinguistic level and likewise in need of reinterpretation – through an explicit ethnohistory of speaking. Extralinguistic cues not only lend a framework for a social history of MPP but also have in turn helped resolve philological puzzles such as specific problems of linguistic analysis of its own or the question of the extent to which Pidgin English was used in early colonial contacts of the eastern Pacific.

Many attestations of MPP display fairly simple, short constructions, which may be as much a feature of the limited recordings by early observers as part of the very structural pattern of the Pidgin. Numerous other instances, however, indicate that speakers could produce more complex constructions consisting of multiple arguments and even sequentially linked clauses (parataxis). The available evidence of longer constructions justifies further searches for suitable documentation and its philological restoration, raising hopes for the discovery of some currently elusive historical documents that describe the Pidgin from other angles and in greater detail than presented here. What inconsistencies remain at this time either raise questions about the documentation's accuracy in isolated occurrences (such as Archibald Campbell's and John Slade's attestations) or suggest possible linguistic variations still in need of an explanation (as in the case of Esteban José Martínez's recording of a construction with a word order of SOV). Those instances that leave questions of philological or other historical restoration unresolved appear clearly identified above as such. By no measure do these questionable items, however, undermine or abrogate the research design, namely a historical-sociolinguistic study of MPP by philological-ethnohistorical reconstitution. Instead, the overall analysis presents a fairly consistent historical-sociolinguistic case study. It confirms expectations for a representative body of systematic philological and sociohistorical data, and also gives inspiration for future research on this and similar cases. Although suggestive in selected aspects, the available data are sufficient in both quality and quantity to offer a truly alternative perspective of how eastern Polynesians interacted with alloglossic European, American, and other visitors to the Pacific in early colonial times.

A central issue in the historical study of MPP remains the nature and range of its linguistic variation and, with it, its extralinguistic contexts. In spirit, this book has espoused a minimally defined variationist approach to account for or at least to recognize variable data, even if it cannot meet the standards of modern variationist sociolinguistic analyses with statistically relevant quantities of data. This approach permits an explicit recognition of historical interrelationships between what were open rather than closed linguistic systems, such as between MPP and hapa haole varieties with a substantial body of Pidgin English components. Such a variationist perspective also makes it possible to incorporate extralinguistic sociohistorical factors in linguistic analysis at some systematic level, thus to approach MPP as a “cultural production and cultural product” (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 49) rather than as a purely linguistic phenomenon.

Notwithstanding any remaining hurdles with historical-sociolinguistic resources, further philological-ethnohistorical research should continue addressing three fundamental issues from multiple, diverse historical sources: (i) the full geographic range of the Pidgin and the extent of its linguistic variation, social distribution, and functional environments; (ii) the Pidgin's changes over time, including its origin as a manifestation of early colonial contact in the Pacific at one end of the historical spectrum; and (iii) its eventual replacement by Pidgin English and French at the other end.

Of special interest remains the function of European and American ships in the spread and persistence of MPP. Additional historical-sociolinguistic research can give us a better appreciation of the interplays between language use and history, as is evident for European explorations, trade, whaling and sealing, missionizing, and plantations in the eastern Pacific. It should also clarify the colonial role of Spaniards in the eastern Pacific (including the Society and Hawaiian Islands) as well as the question of how far MPP extended into the western Pacific, that is western Polynesia and Micronesia, and – with it – how much linguistic variation it permitted without challenging its integrity as a linguistic system. Another issue concerns the precise linguistic and sociohistorical relationship of Pidgin Tahitian to Parau Tinitō as spoken by Chinese immigrants in the twentieth century – a question not addressed above for lack of data on the latter.

A better understanding of the interplay of MPP with its source languages will ultimately help us determine its precise historical role in the diffusion of Polynesian linguistic elements in speakers’ non-Polynesian target languages and its role in the development of the infrastructure for subsequent contact languages, including varieties of Pidgin and Creole English. The subject of variation concerns not solely that across space, but also that over time, calling for an understanding of the full extent of spatial-historical changes from the MPP's formation, stabilization, expansion, and eventual decline. As Roberts has already demonstrated for the Hawaiian Islands, these questions highlight the need for systematic research with a focus on local historical sources (newspapers, court records, diaries, perhaps church records, etc.), but remain beyond the scope of this book.

The available historical evidence documents MPP as a regional indigenous medium based on Eastern Polynesian languages and extending across much of the eastern Pacific from New Zealand to the Societies, the Marquesas, and the Hawaiian Islands, from the early European explorations in the 1760s until some 120 years later. These varieties constituted a unified, areal linguistic system by virtue of highly similar phonologies, a widely shared basic lexicon, and fundamentally the same grammar, as well as by the close historical linguistic relationship of their Central Eastern Polynesian source languages, namely Māori, Tahitian, Marquesan, and Hawaiian. In addition, speakers of MPP, both indigenous and foreign, were in regular contact with each other as part of a network of European and American explorations, maritime trading, and early colonization. This portrayal matches closely what Clark (Reference Clark1977: 27–37; Reference Clark1979: 24–35; Reference Clark, Bell and Holms1990: 100–103) and Roberts (Reference Roberts1995a; Reference Roberts1995b; Reference Roberts2005: 51–128; Reference Roberts2013) have already described as a Polynesian-based South Seas Jargon, Pidgin Māori (Pākehā Māori), or Pidgin Hawaiian (‘ōlelo pa‘i ‘ai). The only difference is that MPP extended across a considerably greater geographic range than any of its local varieties and included Pidgin Tahitian (“Beach Tahitian”, Parau Tinitō) and Pidgin Marquesan. Moreover, I present MPP as a stable pidgin with a correspondingly longer life history rather than as a highly variable jargon. Counter to what Clark (Reference Clark1977: 31, 36; Reference Clark1979: 33) suggested for its early southern variety or South Seas Jargon and despite my own variationist leanings, MPP has not demonstrated any “promiscuous” or “macaronic” mixing so far, whether one wishes to focus exclusively on the lexicon or consider grammar as well. My analysis accordingly differs also from the recent assessment by Roberts (Reference Roberts and Kouwenberg2003: 307–309; Reference Roberts2005: 51–128) of Pidgin Hawaiian as a variable jargon – a position that she apparently has since abandoned for an interpretation in terms of a stable pidgin (Roberts Reference Roberts2013) without, however, offering an explanation.

MPP emerged as a foreigner-talk variety of Tahitian that native Society Islanders adopted in contact with French and British explorers of the eastern Pacific, foremost Bougainville and Cook, in the late 1760s, and that then spread with European explorers and colonists of still other nations following in the Europeans’ footsteps, primarily the recently emerged United States. Polynesian interpreters and pilots as well as foreign visitors exported the Tahitian-based “foreigner talk” to New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Marquesas, which in each case led to the Pidgin's adaptation to local linguistic standards. MPP, however, did not remain a temporary, makeshift linguistic compromise for and by foreigners at one of their early stages of second-language learning, only to be shortly replaced by the local vernacular, much less by a European language. Instead, speakers of vernacular Polynesian languages themselves adopted and used it as an acceptable, even preferable, means of interaction with strangers in clear distinction from grammatically more complex endogenous speech varieties. Repeated documentation of the Pidgin's use by Eastern Polynesians rather than foreigners provides the strongest historical evidence that it was linguistically and socially acceptable and real to Pacific Islanders. If eastern Polynesians had refused to use “foreigner-talk” varieties of their languages with Europeans and Americans, MPP likely would never have come about so early or in this form, if at all (see Part II, especially Chapter 4).

By its linguistic pattern, MPP remained predominantly Polynesian in its phonology, morphology (in the form of reduplications), lexicon, and even syntax, although it exhibited universal tendencies in its phonotactic pattern of open syllables and its basic SVO word order in contrast to the verb-initial structure of Polynesian vernaculars. The Pidgin, however, remained structurally reduced in comparison to its primary source languages, and its speakers relied on sequential linking in place of true complex constructions. As a regional medium, MPP displayed a greater range of linguistic variation among their local varieties in any part of the Pacific than within any local variety by itself, at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels (with, e.g., t ∼ k, unmarked maita‘i ∼ marked motaki ‘good’, and SVO ∼ sporadic VSO). However, when considered in light of its broad geographic range across much of the eastern Pacific, MPP still exhibited a minimal amount of overall linguistic variation because of the close, common historical roots of their source languages as part of the Eastern Polynesian subfamily. What evidence has become available about syntactic variation is principally of two kinds: (i) the alternation of prenominal and postnominal modifiers and (ii) word-order variation at the sentence level, both of which reflect substrate influences from Polynesian languages to varying degrees.

Frequently used nominal modifiers in MPP (such as itiiti ‘very small, very little, very few’, kore ‘useless’, nuinui ‘very large, very great, very much, very many, extremely, very’, and pai ana ‘good’) reflect a grammatical pattern typologically consistent with the SVO word order in contrast to postnominal modifiers correlating typologically with the VSO word order. Based on their historical origin, such prenominals in the Pidgin derived from verb-initial constructions, and postnominals from zero-marked clause embedding or clausal juxtaposition, both of which we find in Polynesian languages. The cooccurrence of prenominal and postnominal modifiers in MPP as well as their different interpretations by speakers of Polynesian and European languages not only as VSO, corresponding to Polynesian stative verbs, but also as SVO, corresponding to European predicates, permitted both kinds of speaker to arrive at similar understandings in MPP (see Chapter 7).

This explanation in part emulates the analysis proposed by Michael Silverstein (Reference Silverstein1972) for Chinook Jargon regarding different underlying grammatical patterns of the speakers’ first languages emerging in similar form on the pidgin's surface structure and the application of this model by Roger M. Keesing (Reference Keesing1988: 89–91, 102) to the Pacific in explaining the similarities between Melanesian Pidgin and its lexifier, English. In contrast to what Silverstein proposed for alloglossic speakers of Chinook Jargon and their different underlying structures depending on their first languages but similarly to Keesing (Reference Keesing1988: 91), I recognize that VSO and SVO in MPP were well within the range of experience to speakers of Austronesian languages. Indeed, Polynesian languages displayed both VSO and SVO patterns, the latter in focused constructions (Keesing Reference Keesing1988: 77–132; Lynch Reference Lynch1998: 152–159). Accordingly, the SVO word order in MPP cannot presume any influence from English, French, or any other European language onto the Pidgin. In other words, the present analysis does not depend on external linguistic input (such as borrowings or other linguistic transfers) from European visitors except as a possible trigger that led Polynesians to draw on their own SVO resources in early colonial language contact. The predominant word order in the Pidgin, too, rebuffs any one-sided rationalization in terms of either Polynesian substrate or European superstrate influences. Not only would Eastern Polynesians likely have preferred VSO to SVO for their grammatical model, had it been in use exclusively among Pacific Islanders, but also European newcomers did not exert sufficient political influence or power to impose their linguistic standards on Pacific Islanders in early colonial times.

The best choice in explaining the SVO word order in MPP remains a combination of Polynesian substrate influences and universals, specifically of the implicational kind. Although such a rationalization has some shortcomings of its own, including a synchronic rather than a diachronic developmental perspective, as well as problems of identification or empirical verification (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 108–112), it is austere and without major internal glitches, and thus theoretically preferable, as already recognized by George Forster (Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 242) over two centuries ago. In this particular case, the first speakers of MPP, by all indications Tahitians, reverted to SVO as a less marked, default form when encountering speakers of strange languages with other word-order patterns, whether or not SVO. They originally did so for a lack of agreement about grammatical standards rather than to yield to foreigners. At the time of first contact, Tahitians obviously did not have any understanding of French or English grammar; Europeans might as well have spoken languages with very different sentence patterns, and MPP likely would still have emerged with the same SVO pattern, as long as Polynesians called the initial shots and Europeans were at their mercy in early encounters. That the visitors’ languages, French and English, exhibited the same word order as their unmarked form therefore proved an accident of history and the result of a limited number of possible word-order combinations rather than any intended common-core model. This explanation thus disagrees fundamentally with the interpretation that the grammar of South Seas Jargon, a southern variety of the MPP, has an English superstrate word order, as suggested by Clark (Reference Clark1977: 30; Reference Clark1979: 26). Instead, it confirms the finding by Keesing (Reference Keesing1988: 13) that Clark “radically underestimates the importance of substrate grammars in shaping the emerging pidgin.”¹

Any underlying grammatical differences that remained between Polynesians and Europeans suspended each other for basically indisputable interpretations and a fairly stable pidgin grammar ultimately at variance with Silverstein's highly variable interpretation of Chinook Jargon. Notwithstanding major grammatical differences among the speakers’ first languages, MPP developed and maintained considerable grammatical stability, as is evident from its reduced linguistic variability, its extended history of no less than a century, and its increased sociohistorical significance. This conclusion indeed distinguishes MPP radically from earlier, variable conceptions of Polynesian-based South Seas Jargon (see 1.1). In other words, speakers of MPP did not continuously reinvent their medium with a highly variable jargon of individualized responses, including a mixed vocabulary, holophrastic or two-word makeshift expressions, a grammar governed by pragmatics and substratum influences, an unstable linguistic structure, poorly defined contexts, rather precarious functions, or an inconsistent transmission between speakers or generations (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 128–138). Instead, the currently available historical data present a quite regular, qualitatively distinct sociolinguistic pattern in contrast to its related vernaculars. Significantly, philological-ethnohistorical research also has continuously pushed back the Pidgin's date of origin to Cook's and probably Bougainville's explorations of the Pacific. Although we must assume that the Pidgin likewise emerged from a pre-pidgin jargon, the evidence for such a Maritime Polynesian Jargon has remained obscure until today.

From a regional perspective, the historical documentation for MPP does not reveal any major syntactic variations (such as verb-initial constructions) until rather late in the historical documentation and thus not as part of the original Pidgin grammar. Instead, the few unquestionable instances of such variable data, arising from a comparison of documentations by Archibald Campbell, Jacobus Boelen, and John Slade, suggest interlinguistic influences from Polynesian vernaculars in the form of either native Polynesian speakers at early stages of learning the Pidgin or else foreigners with some expertise in Polynesian vernaculars (such as missionaries) hypercorrecting the Pidgin to vernacular standards. Speakers at either end of the pidgin spectrum exemplified the process of depidginization, that is “[a] renewed vigorous influence from its original lexifier language, involving the restructuring and/or replacement of earlier lexicon and grammar in favor of patterns from the superimposed ‘target’ language” (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 211), rather than part of the original pidginization process. Such a process recalls analogous variations in word order for a few instances of Melanesian Pidgin of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the early 1890s (Keesing Reference Keesing1988: 132; see 7.3 above).

In accordance with its interpretation as a pidgin, MPP exhibited few if any sociohistorical restrictions in use within eastern Polynesia, where it encountered no major communicative hurdles in spite of any remaining linguistic differences among the island groups of the eastern Pacific. By all available indications, the Pidgin operated as a major contact medium in early encounters between Pacific Islanders and foreigners; it also served as an interlingual medium on board European and American ships with a growing number of Polynesians serving as pilots, interpreters, sailors to replace European or American crew who had jumped ship, as catechists, and in still other roles. MPP occasionally extended its range beyond the boundaries of its home territory by ship to the shores of North America, Mexico, possibly South America, Southeast Asia, plus Europe during early colonial periods. Other prime attested contexts for use were: the foreigners’ trade for the on-board replenishment of basic provisions from Pacific Islands; beachcombing; the maritime fur trade in the north Pacific (with the Hawaiian Islands serving as a major way station between northwestern North America and Asia); whaling and sealing; the trade of sandalwood, trepang, and pearls; amorous encounters between colonists and native women; first attempts by European and American missionaries at converting the native population to Christianity; military or naval operations by colonial powers; and even the engagement of Pacific Islanders for work on the first plantations in the Pacific. At this time, it is not clear to what extent MPP operated as an interlingual medium with Pacific Islanders beyond eastern Polynesia, either on board European or American ships or on shore, as might have been the case in the western Pacific or by early Polynesian communities in western North America. Nor does the historical evidence indicate how speakers of MPP interacted with those of other non-European Pacific pidgins such as those of Tonga, ‘Uvea Island, New Caledonia, or neighboring islands, much less speakers of Chinook Jargon of northwestern North America or Eskimo Jargon of Alaska, with whom they came in contact as well.

The historical-sociolinguistic data about geographic and social distribution as well as its uses and functions suggest that MPP was widespread among islanders of the eastern Pacific by the end of the eighteenth century and through the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas some long-term foreign residents (such as missionaries) successfully learned Hawaiian (leading to the Pidgin's inadvertent depidginization), all Hawaiians acquired competency in Pidgin Hawaiian (‘ōlelo pa‘i ‘ai) at some level – indeed, children of the period used it in contacts with foreigners and then adopted a partially English-relexified version, especially for new items, as a peer-group language “to comply with the ban on the use of Hawaiian in school” (Wilson, personal communication, 29 April 2012). Developing into hapa haole speech of the Hawaiian Islands or its equivalent forms elsewhere in the eastern Pacific, MPP underwent gradual and partial relexification under the influence of European tongues, foremost English, by the mid-nineteenth century. Much of what we surmise for the Hawaiian Islands apparently applied also in the Societies and New Zealand, although under slightly variable sociolinguistic conditions. However, better comparative evidence will first have to determine what happened in the Marquesas.

Ultimately, MPP's decline later in the nineteenth century remains partially shrouded in history, obscured by frequent stereotypical renditions as or translations into Pidgin English or English. At no known point in time did MPP per se, however, undergo any structural-functional expansion despite its broad functional range and a favorable sociolinguistic environment when Polynesian women used it in interactions with foreign men on or off board or when children came into play and adopted it as well. The Pidgin, then, did not develop into an expanded pidgin similarly to modern Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea or undergo creolization by acquiring a community of native speakers and, with it, greater grammatical complexity. MPP apparently remained a reduced medium and a second language throughout its entire history, but persisted in niches well into the second half of the nineteenth and even into the early twentieth century. Only much later, by the end of the nineteenth century or even in the early twentieth century, would an Anglicized variety eventually creolize in the Hawaiian Islands.

By the standards of pidgin and creole studies, MPP meets all conditions of a true pidgin – a “partially targeted second language learning and second language creation, developing from simpler to more complex systems as communicative requirements become more demanding” (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 6) with social norms of acceptability, but without a community of native speakers. Significantly, the accumulated linguistic and sociohistorical evidence clearly points to a widely recognized, established medium between Pacific Islanders of the eastern Pacific and foreigners, even if the available historical attestations give no indication for a distinct regional name of its own. MPP does extraordinarily well in meeting the structural-functional criteria of pidgins as spelled out by Mühlhäusler (Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 138–163) and Siegel (Reference Siegel2008: 11–42). It furthermore lends support to a multi-causal model of origin by recognizing substratum, superstratum, and universal influences following the so-called complementary hypothesis (Baker and Corne Reference Baker, Chris, Muysken and Smith1986; Hancock Reference Hancock, Muysken and Smith1986; and especially Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Muysken and Smith1986) in the absence of agreed grammatical standards among the preceding jargon speakers.

MPP closely matches other pidgins in the following structural features: a fairly uniform lexicon and quite a stable grammar with established linguistic and social norms independent of the speakers’ first languages in a recognized speech community of their own or what Keith Whinnom (Reference Whinnom and Hymes1971: 104–107) suitably termed “tertiary hybridization.” Not only did the Pidgin adhere to a small inventory of distinctive sounds, open syllables and a pattern of alternating consonant-vowel, and a preference for bisyllabic over longer words, but also, like other pidgins, it exhibited a lack of inflectional morphology (with number, tense and aspect expressed by distinct, independent forms) and easy categorial shifts of words from one word class to another (“categorial multifunctionality”), a convention upon which speakers could draw in Polynesian languages as well as in English. MPP emulated other pidgins in expressing possibilities, contingencies, and similar functions by sentence-external qualifiers of propositions, as illustrated by initial tense-aspect markers or negatives. The Pidgin additionally agreed with what we know about pidgins in general by infrequently displaying any distinction of number, usually limited to the singular and plural and expressed by quantifiers or numerals. Grammatical words such as prepositions in MPP were few as in other pidgins. Ultimately, MPP fully mirrored other pidgins with its reliance on syntax, specifically word order and the most widespread pattern of SVO, as primary organizing principle. Like other typical pidgins, however, MPP displayed little derivational depth in the form of grammatical operations, characteristic of their source or target languages; it made up for a lack of embedding and complex constructions by sequentially linking sentences to express continuous action, causative relationships, conditions, atemporal relationships, comparisons, contrasts and exceptions, clarifications, and grammatical subordinations. Moreover, MPP emulated other pidgins in allowing but limited stylistic flexibility.

For sociocultural functions, MPP agrees with well-known, “classic” trade languages (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 76–78) by mostly operating in a conventional context of colonial explorations, trade, and early settlements, which link to its origin during European voyaging in the second half of the eighteenth century. Significantly, the Pidgin displayed an economic dependency by Europeans and Americans on the close cooperation by Pacific Islanders during the early colonial period, but appeared to retain considerable sociolinguistic flexibility with few or no restrictions imposed by the newcomers on it. In spite of its use by early Christian missionaries in the Pacific, the Pidgin did not, however, come to assume any known role in any millenarian religious movement, quite unlike pidgins in cargo cults in Papua New Guinea. Nor did MPP apparently take on any other extraordinary function, such as was evidently the case for Native American speakers of Delaware and Mobilian Jargons in the form of a sociocultural buffer since the early nineteenth century.

MPP specifically offers comparative data for the early colonial stages of a pidgin and a non-European instance, in both of which pidgin and creole studies have been largely deficient. That a non-European case, even though of colonial origin, lends support to a multiple causation, including substratum, superstratum, and universal influences (the “complementary hypothesis”), perhaps comes as no surprise. However, it remains significant for the fact that this finding draws on a non-European instance with a longitudinal foundation. In contrast to European-based cases, MPP also refocuses attention onto Pacific Islanders as key players of the early colonial scenery rather than as passive by-standers, “beneficiaries,” or victims of European and American colonialism. All sociolinguistic arguments for MPP point to a substantially greater role by eastern Polynesians – foremost Tahitians, but also Māori and Hawaiians – in early colonial contact with Europeans than conventional linguistics, social science, or history have attributed to them. What speaks for such an alternative interpretation is the fact that ethnocentric, often racist, Europeans and Americans willy-nilly accepted the social, economic, and political realities by recognizing the importance of eastern Polynesians, which left little choice to the foreigners but to adopt the islanders’ interlingual medium in the eastern Pacific for at least 120 years. MPP indeed proves a major, fairly direct linguistic measure of eastern Polynesians’ historical significance in the early colonial history of the Pacific.

Appreciating the central role of Pacific Islanders in the history of MPP, notwithstanding any universal developmental tendencies, carries major implications for our understanding of its origin. For one, MPP diverged from familiar pidgins of the Pacific by the fact that for its primary sources it drew on non-European languages (like some other non-European instances). For another implication, the Pidgin differed from better-known non-European-based instances such as Police/Hiri Motu of Papua New Guinea (Dutton and Voorhoeve Reference Dutton and Voorhoeve1974; Dutton Reference Dutton1985) and Chinook Jargon of northwestern North America (Hymes Reference Hymes, Valdman and Highfield1980: 405–418; Thomason Reference Thomason1983) in that currently we cannot raise any sociolinguistic arguments for a pre-European origin. The eastern Pacific simply lacked sufficient linguistic diversity and long-term regional trade or political associations for pidginization to have occurred before contact with Europeans. In other words, MPP illustrates a case in which Europeans and Americans upon their arrival in the Pacific could not draw upon already existing sociolinguistic networks except perhaps for a foreigner-talk version of Tahitian. Foreign visitors, therefore, had to make use of what eastern Polynesians offered them as a means of communication, as they were not in a political position to impose their own sociolinguistic infrastructure until about a century later.

These sociohistorical findings about MPP have major implications for our broader understanding of pidgin and creole origin (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 93–126; Siegel Reference Siegel2008: 11–42). For one, I have placed great emphasis on seafaring and the role of sailors, but do not draw on the nautical-jargon theory, as it fails to address major linguistic disparities between nautical English and MPP as well as the role of non-European and Polynesian crews on board European and American ships (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 94–96). This study has also taken into consideration Tahitian foreigner talk as the initial foundation of MPP, but ultimately it does not build upon foreigner-talk or similar theories. Although foreigner-talk varieties resemble early stages of second-language learning for their morphological simplicity (Siegel Reference Siegel2008: 26–27), they neglect cultural conventions, especially those of Society Islanders, natural tendencies towards input simplification, and later stages in language development (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 96–102). Nor does the historical evidence for MPP leave any room for common-core theories for the already stated fundamental problems of communicative relevance, an entirely static model, the need for presuming a bilingual competency for the Pidgin's grammar, or growing counterevidence (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 113–114). Much less do my arguments for MPP, although by all indications of colonial origin, yield to any Eurocentric model of pidginization for failing to give recognition to the indigenous population as historical actors in colonial encounters rather than as inactive recipients (Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 73–74, 102–108; Versteegh Reference Versteegh, Kouwenberg and Singler2008: 158–167).

On the other hand, MPP cannot fully accommodate what Jeff Siegel (Reference Siegel2008: 31–40) offers as an alternative model of pidginization from the perspective of second-language learning, drawing on universal grammar, constructivist theories with a focus on communicative functions, and speech-production models, whose output speakers supplemented with linguistic mixing and leveling. At first sight, the primary case example upon which Siegel (Reference Siegel2008: 11–18) draws, namely Pidgin Fijian, exhibits striking structural similarities to MPP in its overall word order and even in some specific grammatical features (such as the negative in initial position). Given the common historical ancestry of the Polynesian language family and Fijian, this finding comes as no surprise, and we might even conjecture some common history for MPP and Pidgin Fijian, although there is no indication that one was mutually intelligible to speakers of the other because of significant lexical differences. At closer examination, Siegel's model cannot account for what, in terms of their grammars, Polynesians with verb-initial sentence patterns would have interpreted quite differently in early colonial contacts with Europeans, speaking SVO languages, without losing the essence of the message in their exchanges. As Keesing (Reference Keesing1988: 89–91, 96, 102) has already suggested for Melanesian Pidgin, this kind of sociolinguistic situation requires a multi-level model as suggested by Silverstein (Reference Silverstein1972) for Chinook Jargon with different underlying patterns and as used also in this book in modified form, taking into account obvious differences between northwestern North America and the eastern Pacific. A Silversteinian model reflects the speakers’ first languages, but permits convergent surface structures and minimal crosslinguistic understanding. While allowing for linguistic compromises across linguistic boundaries, such an interpretation also reintroduces the significance of non-European languages in language contact and pidginization, and gives greater recognition to their speakers as historical actors.

Arguments for MPP as a regional interlingual medium between Polynesians and European or American foreigners suggest other, wider implications for the eastern Pacific. Significantly, local varieties could not have survived in an environment of limited linguistic heterogeneity or in isolation as long as they did; MPP thrived only on linguistic diversity and, by implication, in geographically wide-ranging areas (see, e.g., Thomason and Kaufman Reference Thomason and Kaufman1988). Pidgin Hawaiian by itself would likely not have endured as long in the Hawaiian Islands without the broader sociolinguistic infrastructure of MPP; similarly, other varieties such as Pidgin Tahitian, Pidgin Marquesan, and Pidgin Māori in turn fed for support on Pidgin Hawaiian as well as on each other. The primary vehicle for the Pidgin's spread in the eastern Pacific and beyond was European and American ships, especially those embracing Pacific Islanders of eastern Polynesian provenance among their crews, well into the late nineteenth century. When European and American newcomers could speak one variety of the Pidgin on board and also use it throughout much of the eastern Pacific with only minor modifications, Pacific Islanders as a result were subject to less pressure to accept European languages. Alternatively, had European colonization concentrated only on one archipelago within Polynesia, we might not in fact expect the Pidgin to have arisen, and language contact would have remained principally bilingual in nature.

The present model of language contact between Pacific Islanders and early colonial Europeans is very much at odds with some historians’ recent ideas on the subject: European runaways among the Māori of New Zealand, so-called Pākehā Māori, supposedly learned to speak like locals according to Trevor Bentley (Reference Bentley1999: 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 49, 78, 91, 95, 115, 133, 140, 166, 171–172). Similarly, foreign beachcombers on various Pacific islands reportedly acquired proficiency in other Polynesian languages in a period of only a few months to a year (Campbell Reference Campbell1998: 30, 48, 54, 62, 74, 99; Milcairns Reference Milcairns2006: 129). Following Bentley (Reference Bentley1999: 10), the Pākehā Māori allegedly differed from beachcombers and interlopers on other Pacific Islands by “the extent to which they integrated with and depended upon Maori for their livelihoods,” including their linguistic skills. While by all indications some European runaways indeed integrated fully with the Māori, many other Pākehā did not do so by Bentley's own suggestions (see Bentley Reference Bentley1999: 32, 33, 49, 55, 60, 89, 90, 117–118, 123, 149, 162, 169, 191), whence there remain serious doubts about their fluency in vernacular Māori. Regrettably, such conflicting sociolinguistic indications or a lack of supporting linguistic documentation did not prevent Susanne Williams Milcairns (Reference Milcairns2006: 15) from explicitly promoting Bentley's distinction by excluding the Pākehā Māori from her recent survey of beachcombers, renegades, and castaways in the Pacific on the same tenuous grounds.

In reality, the evidence of Pidgin Māori in particular and MPP at large provides a substantial amount of historical documentation to the contrary and only for a limited integration of Europeans or Americans in native Māori or other eastern Polynesian society. Documentation of the Pidgin indicates strongly that even the most open-minded, empathetic, and committed European adoptees of the Māori could not fully learn their hosts’ language within a year, thus raising major questions about Bentley's claims to European fluency in Māori and, by extension, Milcairns’ unfounded distinction between European Māori and European beachcombers on other Pacific islands. From a sociolinguistic perspective, Pidgin Māori indeed differed little in structure or function from the reduced Polynesian forms spoken by beachcombers, renegades, and castaways on other islands of eastern Polynesia.

On the one hand, the findings about MPP have broader sociohistorical implications and relate directly to its multiple early, intimate links to the maritime fur trade of northwestern North America in the Hawaiian Islands. However surprising in light of the transitional nature of the fur trade and its exogenous sources aside from the local monk seal, such a link is consistent with results from earlier historical research by Kuykendall (Reference Kuykendall1923, Reference Kuykendall1924), F. W. Howay (Reference Howay, Taylor and Kuykendall1930), and Harold W. Bradley (Reference Bradley1942: 1–120), who already recognized the fur trade in the Hawaiian Islands as a significant historical process, since reinterpreted by Eric Wolf (Reference Wolf1982: 158–194) as part of a hemispheric or global trade phenomenon. At the center was the prime fur-trading corporation of Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company with headquarters in London, which maintained a major variety store in downtown Honolulu from 1829 until 1861, importing timber, salmon, agricultural produce, and various manufactured goods to the Hawaiian Islands, while managing the shipment of fur from North America to Asia via the Hawaiian Islands (Spoehr Reference Spoehr1986; Reference Spoehr1988). Still, the maritime fur trade has apparently fallen into oblivion with historians of the Hawaiian Islands other than for a few exemplary studies (Naughton Reference Naughton1983; Koppel Reference Koppel1995; Chappell Reference Chappell1997; Barman Reference Barman2004; and Barman and Watson Reference Barman and Watson2006). The maritime fur trade barely receives any attention in the exemplary ethnohistorical study of O‘ahu in the early nineteenth century, Anahulu, by Marshall Sahlins (Reference Sahlins and Barrère1992: 3, 37–38), when it was the driving force of the emergent economy of the Hawaiian Islands. Nor, surprisingly, did it attract any consideration in the sociohistorical review of Pidgin Hawaiian by Roberts (Reference Roberts1995a).

In recognizing the impact of the maritime fur trade in the Pacific and the example of the Hudson's Bay Company store in Honolulu, we would expect the direction of linguistic and cultural influences to point from northwestern North America to the Islands. That such American influences have remained elusive until today lends further support to the significance of the Hawaiian Islands as a major way station in the Pacific and of Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders in interethnic interactions of the period. The linguistic evidence, then, lends indisputable support to the notion that, against claims to stereotypical westward expansion, the relationship between western North America and the Hawaiian Islands was not unidirectional from east to west, but had in many respects been reciprocal. The Hawaiian Islands served as entrepôt for the early explorations of western North America by the British and Americans; in addition, Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders engaged regularly as field hands on the continent on behalf of foreign masters, jumped ship in pursuit of fur in the Northwest or subsequently in search of gold in California, and associated intimately with the native population of western North America (Barman and Watson Reference Barman and Watson2006: 1–218), which linguistically resulted in Hawaiian or Pidgin Hawaiian loans in Chinook Jargon and Eskimo Jargon (Drechsel and Makuakāne Reference Drechsel and Makuakāne1982).

What from a macroeconomic perspective constituted the maritime fur trade for the Hawaiian Islands in the early colonial period was whaling and sealing as well as the trade of sandalwood, trepang, and pearls for other Pacific archipelagos at later periods. Quite aside from the fact that historically many of these economic endeavors were often complementary for those pursuing any one enterprise, these various forms of trade shared with each other the fact that they drew on local resources, except the exogenous fur, and relied on native peoples in key roles for the exploitation and transportation of these resources. From a socioeconomic perspective, these different forms of trade were therefore comparable in that they created similar sociolinguistic situations of economic dependency by colonial newcomers on the Pacific Islanders, which corresponded directly to the continued endurance of MPP into the second half of the nineteenth century. Sociolinguistically, it made little difference whether the product was fur, whale oil, sandalwood, trepang, or pearls.

The discussion of MPP must inevitably return to the question of its relationship to Pidgin English, so dear to Europhile creolists and other linguists skeptical about the applicability of concepts from pidgin and creole studies to non-European languages – what in fact has largely proved a linguistic phantom in the Pacific through the first half of the nineteenth century. Early evidence of MPP confirms no more than isolated borrowed words from English, and other attestations of English or Pidgin English influences remain scarce and unreliable, if not altogether absent, through the mid-nineteenth century. The sources examined for this book reveal fewer references to Pidgin English than to MPP, if any, and no more than sporadic supporting examples. Moreover, many of these examples actually prove to be translations of either MPP or an indigenous language or stereotypical renditions of native speech, as is evident from linguistic or extralinguistic clues within the available texts (see 7.4). That most Pidgin English entries did not appear until the second half of the nineteenth century or still later is historically significant, as it is indicative of MPP's very own viability and historical persistence.

In the eastern Pacific, English came to assume the role of a major interlingual medium only when Pacific Islanders lost control over most of their resources, land, and destiny with native governments and landlords and when instead Europeans or Americans assumed power in the hemisphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. The gradual replacement of MPP with European languages, reduced or non-reduced, has echoed the sociopolitical circumstances fairly closely except that language did not always follow the flip-flop behavior of politics. A gradual relexification of MPP with Pidgin English after the mid-nineteenth century suggests accompanying sociolectal variations similar to those attested in other speech continua, including a basilect, a mesolect, and an acrolect. There were also different ranges within the continuum correlating with different social positions such that a long-term trader likely spoke a range of varieties closer to the original version than a recent immigrant. In most instances, the sociolinguistic change-over apparently culminated with the take-over of local political affairs by colonists. The case of Pidgin Hawaiian switching to Pidgin English evidently linked closely to the concomitant changes in political power climaxing in the overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani by American businessmen and the United States in the Hawaiian Islands at the end of the nineteenth century. Analogous linguistic-political correlations similarly applied to New Zealand, the Society Islands, and the Marquesas, although most linguistic and political changes, including uprisings, developed gradually rather than in any sudden manner (see Thomas Reference Thomas2010).

Claims for the early use of Pidgin English in the Pacific, then, must find substantiation in better, indisputable historical documentation on a systematic scale; any changes from MPP toward Pidgin English, to the extent that they mirrored social realities, also should better demonstrate the relationships to the Polynesians’ social, economic, or political positions in the eastern Pacific. Whereas some records suggest a gradual relexification of MPP with Pidgin English during the second half of the nineteenth century, this process still requires a more systematic description and analysis by variationist means such as distributional data and implicational scaling, as successfully applied to modern creole continua. Then again, creolists must still address the issues of stereotypical renditions and translations of native speech in historical records. Until research on Pidgin English addresses these fundamental problems about its sociohistorical roots and context, any understanding of relexification from MPP to Pidgin English necessarily remains tenuous. When there exists at best limited historical evidence in support of Pidgin English, any projection back in time without any historical substantiation smacks of blatant presentism.

Currently, the available evidence for MPP and Pacific Pidgin English would, however, suggest that they could hardly have competed in similar functions in the same larger speech community and at the same time. Instead, we expect MPP as the first established regional interlingual medium to have remained a major sociolinguistic impediment for the spread of Pidgin English through the mid-nineteenth century, as indeed indicated by the historical record. Even once established as a new medium in the community, English, in either reduced or full-fledged form, still did not necessarily become the exclusive or even primary interlingual medium of the eastern Pacific in the late nineteenth century; it was only one among many other means by which native and foreign residents interacted in crosscultural contacts at the time. From a sociolinguistic perspective, Europeans and Americans still considered the option of learning indigenous languages, albeit mostly in incomplete, reduced forms, during the early contacts. Even when established as colonial powers, Europeans and Americans very often continued relying on MPP in order to communicate with the native population effectively, as they could not expect all native islanders to adopt European languages in either pidginized or fully developed form. When Europeans and Americans eventually made major inroads into local Pacific societies after the mid-nineteenth century, MPP lost out, however, against English or French – only to survive a few more decades in communication with non-European immigrants.