The Solomon Islands aren’t the most famous country in the world—in fact, many people who aren’t familiar with Oceania don’t know the country at all. The Solomon Islands is a Pacific Island nation off the coast of Papua New Guinea, both of which are located in the Oceanic subregion of Melanesia, alongside other nations like Fiji and New Caledonia. The indigenous inhabitants of the Solomon Islands speak several different languages—74, to be precise—so they need a lingua franca to tie them all together. That’s the role Pijin plays.
Pijin’s name comes from the English word “pidgin,” which refers to a simplified version of a language that develops among multiple groups of people without a common language. When a pidgin language is learned by community members as a first language, it becomes a creole language. Despite its name, Pijin has become a creole language with around 24,000 native speakers and roughly 300,000 second-language speakers in the Solomon Islands. It’s used as the country’s primary lingua franca, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find translation services—so we at TranslationServices.com have set up our own Pijin translation team.
We’d love to provide a free quote for our Pijin translation services—just reach out and request one!
What is Pijin like?
English is the official language of the Solomon Islands, but only around 2% of the population can speak it fluently—the de facto lingua franca is Pijin, an English-based creole language. Pijin is closely related to Tok Pisin, the main lingua franca of the incredibly multilingual Papua New Guinea, and Bislama, the lingua franca of the fellow Melanesian country of Vanuatu. English speakers who learn a bit about the language may be able to decipher texts in Pijin.
Pijin uses the same complicated pronoun system that so many other languages in Oceania do, with multiple versions of the first-person pronouns depending on whether the listener is included. Pijin pronouns also come in four numbers—singular, dual, trial, and plural. Pijin, like Tok Pisin, also has a suffix it adds to transitive verbs, which is realized as -m, -im, or -em, depending on the phonological makeup of the root word. Possessives are expressed through the particle blong, from English “belong,” although this is quite often shortened to blo’.
Pijin may be based on English, but the strong Austronesian roots of the language simultaneously give it stark differences from English. But don’t worry—our Pijin translators are well versed in Pijin translation.
Pijin translation services that cater to your needs
If you want translation services for Pijin, the lingua franca of the Solomon Islands, you’re in luck. Translation agencies rarely work with Pijin, but we’ve put together a skilled translation team for the language, capable of translating both to and from Pijin. So, whether you want us to translate historical documents in Pijin, literature in Pijin, official texts in Pijin, or anything else, we’ll happily be your link to the English-speaking world. If you want to translate content into Pijin, our team is ready to help you translate business materials, educational content, books, websites, apps, games, poems, and more—always with a quality guarantee!
Get in touch with us today with the details of your Pijin translation project, and we’ll get right to work.