Maritime Polynesian Pidgin: Philological-Ethnohistorical Evidence of
Interlingual Communications in the Early Colonial Pacific
Emanuel J. Drechsel
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Although subtitled “Origins, Growth and Development,” the recent encyclopedic
book Pacific Pidgins and Creoles by Darrell T. Tryon and Jean-Michel Charpentier
summarily writes off any non-European, Polynesian pidgin in the eastern Pacific –
only to find that no reliable historical attestations for Pidgin English became available
on any substantive scale for the period before the mid-nineteenth century.
Surprisingly, the authors show no concern for how Europeans communicated with
Islanders of the eastern Pacific in the early colonial period before the introduction of
Pidgin English as prime interlingual medium. The present paper offers various
linguistic attestations for a so-called Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in early
documentation by explorers, travelers, traders, missionaries, and settlers in the eastern
Pacific. Of special interest are the linguistic patterns of multiple closely related
varieties such as Hawaiian Pidgin (‘ōlelo pa‘i‘ai), Tahitian Pidgin (Parau Tinitō),
Marquesan Pidgin, and Māori Pidgin (Pākehā Māori), as philologically
reconstitutable by triangulation with modern lexical data from Polynesian languages.
Another question addresses the sociohistorical contexts of use, as determined by a
careful consideration of ethnohistorical criteria. Initial findings establish Maritime
Polynesian Pidgin not only across much of eastern Polynesia, but beyond on board of
ships from the late 1760s into the second half of the nineteenth century. Current
findings also suggest a greater range of linguistic variations and usages than Derek
Bickerton and J.M. Roberts have hitherto recognized for Pidgin Hawaiian (including
VSO next to SVO and an unmistakable linkage to the fur trade of northwestern North
America). My presentation aims at an integrated historical-sociolinguistic synopsis of
Maritime Polynesian Pidgin until the period when European languages, whether in
reduced or standard forms, come to replace it. My presentation ultimately makes an
argument for an integrated historical-sociolinguistic approach as already successfully
applied in the case of Mobilian Jargon, the Muskogean-based pidgin of greater
Louisiana.
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