Solomon Islands Pijin Alphabet & Phrases

Pijin is written in the Latin alphabet with a spelling that follows the sounds rather than English. The letters it needs are A B D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y, 22 in all. There are no accented letters and no special characters, so a phone or computer set to English already has everything. The letters c, q, x and z are not part of the spelling of ordinary Pijin words; they appear in names and in English words written the English way.

Spelled by sound, many English words look new on paper: haos (house), taem (time), skul (school), wantok (one talk: a person of your own language and home), gudfala (good) and bigfala (big). Diphthongs are written with two vowels, as in taem, haos and bae (will, later). The pair ng is the sound in English singer, as in long (in, at, to), and the famous tanggio (thank you) writes the ngg of English finger. Each vowel keeps one steady value, close to the vowels of Spanish or Italian.

The 2008 Pijin Bible uses yu for you and yumi for we. In texts and on social media the same word turns up as tanggio, tangio or tagio, and iu is often written yu. All of these are understood; for anything printed, pick one form and keep it through the whole text.

How to type Pijin, its quotation marks and the dollar sign

Nothing special is needed to type Pijin: every letter is on a standard keyboard and on every phone. Punctuation follows English, with “double quotation marks” outside and ‘single ones’ inside; a phone usually turns the straight " and ' into the curly “ ” ‘ ’ by itself. On a Windows computer the Alt codes are Alt+0147 for “, Alt+0148 for ”, Alt+0145 for ‘ and Alt+0146 for ’; on a Mac they are Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ for the double pair, Option+] and Option+Shift+] for the single pair.

The Solomon Islands dollar is written with the ordinary dollar sign $, or SI$ when it has to be told apart from other dollars, and its currency code is SBD. Like most dollars it is divided into 100 cents, so prices read $5 or $250.

Common Solomon Islands Pijin phrases and how the grammar works

Everyday Pijin greetings are easy to copy: Halo! (hello), Gud morning (good morning), Hao nao? (how's it going?), Mi gud nomoa (I'm fine), Tanggio tumas (thank you very much) and Lukim iu (see you). A friend met on the road is often asked Iu go wea? (where are you going?). To say your name: Nem bilong mi … (my name is …), and to ask: Wanem nao nem bilong iu?

Most of the vocabulary comes from English, but the grammar is Melanesian. Bilong marks belonging, as in haos bilong mi (my house). Olketa before a noun makes it plural, olketa pikinini (the children), and on its own means they. Hem means he, she or it. Bae before a verb points to the future: bae mi go, I will go. Verbs that take an object usually end in -im or -em: lukim (to see someone), kaikaim (to eat something), from kaikai, food. Nao puts weight on a word, as in Hem nao! (that's it!), and barava means really or very: barava gud.

Pijin marks inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns: iumi includes the person you are talking to and mifala excludes them; it also has dual and trial forms such as iumitufala/mitufala and iumitrifala/mitrifala. The plural second-person form is iufala, with iutufala and iutrifala for two and three people.

Where Pijin is spoken and how it is related to Tok Pisin and Bislama

Pijin is spoken all over the Solomon Islands, from Honiara on Guadalcanal to Malaita, the Western Province and the outer islands. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 600,000 speakers, most of the country: the Solomons have some seventy local languages, and Pijin is the one people from different islands share. English is the official language of government and schools, but in the market, on the bus, on SIBC radio and at home in Honiara, Pijin is what people speak, and many children in town now grow up with it as their first language.

Pijin grew out of the Pacific pidgin English of the nineteenth century, when many islanders were taken to work on the plantations of Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, and it later spread and developed further on plantations in the Solomon Islands. The word pidgin is usually explained as a Chinese pronunciation of English business.

Its closest relatives are Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Bislama in Vanuatu: all three grew from the same pidgin, share words such as kaikai, pikinini and wantok, and speakers can follow a good deal of each other's language (Pijin and Bislama use blong; Tok Pisin uses bilong). For the other language of the country see English, and for the 🇸🇧 flag, the crocodile and shark of the coat of arms, the reef, the canoes and the rest of the country's emoji see Solomon Islands.