| Also Known As: Bichelamar,Bislama
Description:
Bislama is a creole language, one of the official languages of Vanuatu. It is the first language of many of the "Urban ni-Vanuatu" (those who live in Port Vila and Luganville), and the second language of the rest of the country's residents. "Yumi, Yumi, Yumi", the Vanuatu national anthem, is in Bislama.
More than 95% of Bislama words are of English origin; the remainder combines a few dozen words from French, as well as some vocabulary inherited from various languages of Vanuatu, essentially limited to flora and fauna terminology. While the influence of these vernacular languages is low on the vocabulary side, it is very high in the morphosyntax. Essentially speaking, Bislama can be described as a language with an English vocabulary and an Austronesian grammar.
During the period known as Blackbirding, in the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Pacific islanders (many of them from the New Hebrides archipelago) were enslaved and forced to work on plantations, mainly in Queensland, Australia and Fiji. With several languages being spoken in these plantations, a pidgin was formed, combining English vocabulary with grammatical structures typical of languages in the region. This..... full article at Wikipedia |
