Torres Strait Creole
| Torres Strait Creole | |
|---|---|
| Yumplatok | |
| Region | Australia |
|
Native speakers
|
6,000 (2006 census) |
|
English Creole
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | torr1261 |
| AIATSIS | P2* |
| Linguasphere | 52-ABB-cb (varieties: |
Torres Strait Creole (also Torres Strait Pidgin, Yumplatok, Torres Strait Brokan/Broken, Cape York Creole, Lockhart Creole, Papuan Pidgin English, Broken English, Brokan/Broken, Blaikman, Big Thap) is an English-based creole language spoken on several Torres Strait Islands (Queensland, Australia), Northern Cape York and South-Western Coastal Papua. It has approximately 25,000 mother-tongue and bi/tri-lingual speakers, as well as several second/third-language speakers. It is widely used as a language of trade and commerce. It has six main dialects: Papuan, Western-Central, TI, Malay, Eastern, and Cape York. Its main characteristics show that it is a Pacific Pidgin, but the future in X [i] go VERB aligns it with Atlantic Creoles. Related languages are Pijin of the Solomon Islands, Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea, and Bislama of Vanuatu. The other creoles of Australia (such as Roper River Kriol and Australian Kriol language) are more distantly related, being descendants of the Pidgin English that developed in and around Sydney after the colonisation of Australia.
Records of pidgin English being used in Torres Strait exist from as early as the 1840s (e.g. Moore 1979), and therefore Torres Strait Creole may very well be as old as, if not older, than its sister languages, and not a descendant of any of these. The main importers of the pidgin were British and other sailors, many of whom were South Sea Islanders, both Melanesian and Polynesian, as well as Island South-East Asians, Jamaicans, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, and others. Therefore, Brokan has various characteristics of these different types of Pidgin, the main ones being Singapore Pidgin, Pacific Pidgin and Jamaican Creole. It may have creolised quite early (pre-1900) on Darnley Island, and somewhat later (post-1910) at St Pauls on Moa and on Yorke Island in the Central Islands. Creolisation is post-1960s elsewhere.
The Papuan dialect was replaced by Hiri Motu in many parts of its former territory, and now also by Tok Pisin.
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