Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English by Emanuel J Drechsel (review)

Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific examines the historical evidence for Maritime Polynesian Pidgin (mpp). It makes the case for a Polynesian-based pidgin that formed during European encounters with the region as early as the 1760s and endured for over a century before any European language–based pidgins and creoles would emerge. As the most recent volume in Cambridge University Press’s interdisciplinary series Approaches to Language Contact, Drechsel’s volume presents the reader with a theoretically and methodologically innovative study. Painstakingly amassing and interpreting the evidence for a Polynesian-based pidgin that functioned as an important early colonial intercultural medium of maritime communication in the Pacific, Drechsel offers a significant contribution to Pacific history and regional linguistics.

An image by the Armenian-American painter Arman Manookian (1904–1931) adorns the cover of the book and depicts a scene with Hawaiians in the foreground on land, gazing seaward toward an offshore ship, sails unfurled. The author notes the rarity of this perspective in period paintings, which often represent contact between Polynesians and Europeans from the European viewpoint, that is, from a ship’s deck toward a Pacific island. Extending this artistic analogy to linguistic research on pidgins in the early colonial Pacific, the author notes that “art emulates political and linguistic realities” (7) and emphasizes how few studies have yet seriously considered the sociohistorical importance of Polynesians as speaking persons and of Polynesian languages as primary agentive influences in the emergence of a maritime pidgin in the Pacific.

With this intriguing opening, the author introduces the puzzle presented by mpp: What evidence has been missed, overlooked, or misinterpreted that might shed light on a renewed and reconsidered linguistic and political understanding of the early colonial Pacific? In pursuing these questions, the reader is thrust into Drechsel’s critical commentary on the Eurocentric cultural blinders that he suggests are influencing current theories on the emergence and functional roles of jargons and pidgins in this regional context. His introduction argues that the majority of scholarly discussions on this issue tend to be both contradictory in their claims and biased in favor of the view that early colonial jargons and pidgins must have been based on European languages, privileging the linguistic role of European and American sailors as the main contributors to a new maritime contact variety, which would quickly have been adopted throughout the Pacific. Drechsel proposes a new model of language contact, one that was initiated by Tahitians using a reduced variety of Tahitian in acts of linguistic accommodation in encounters with European voyagers and later stabilized as mpp. During the period of stabilization, both colonial sailors and Polynesians took up other varieties of reduced Polynesian languages—in particular reduced Hawaiian and Māori—in their intercultural encounters across the Pacific, yielding a surprisingly capacious, effective, and trans-Oceanic communicative matrix.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides a challenging examination of the questions, theories, and methods of historical sociolinguistics, plunging the reader into the relevant context of Drechsel’s nuanced proposal for the existence and role of mpp in the early colonial Pacific. In this part, the author also provides a fuller explanation for why the existence of mpp has been difficult to identify due to perspectives that have assumed the greater influence of European languages as forming the basis of contact mediums in the early colonial Pacific. The previous lack of a rigorous methodological approach, sensitive to the concomitant sociolinguistic, political, and ethnohistorical contexts of the time, has served to reinforce standard perspectives. With an innovative methodology that primarily employs ethnohistory and philology, and further drawing on socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology, Drechsel complicates and subverts the Eurocentric model of early language contacts and encounters. This methodological hybridity, he argues, is better equipped to engage in the project of...