Less than two weeks in, and I already know how to speak sea cucumber

I've just returned to Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital, after a wonderful ten days spent on a small island called Pele.  Along with another new Peace Corps Response volunteer, I lived on the island with a host family and had lessons in Bislama, Vanuatu's national language.  Bislama is a creole language in which most of the words are based on English with some French influences, but the sentence structure and grammar have connections to local island languages.  Vanuatu happens to be the most linguistically dense country in the world, as far as how many languages are spoken here per the population size - there is somewhere around one language for every 2,000 people, well over 100 languages.  Because of this linguistic diversity, there wasn't much of a way for people from different islands or even different parts of the same island to communicate.  When Ni-Vanuatu (the word for people from Vanuatu) were "recruited" (often forcefully) to work on sugar plantations in Australia, Fiji, and Samoa in the 1800s, Bislama was developed so they would have a way to communicate among one another.  It's very similar to Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and Pijn, spoken in the Solomon islands.

As we learned Bislama, Nick (the other PC Response volunteer) and I would occasionally wonder how Bislama got its name.  After all, the names Tok Pisin and Pijin both clearly are based on "Pidgin English" - but what does Bislama mean?  It was on our list to ask our language trainer during one of our classes, but before we got around to that I was lying on the beach reading one of the "B" pages in my Bislama dictionary when I came across the following definition: "beche de mer: bislama."  For those of you not familiar with what a "bȇche de mer" is, it is a sea cucumber - a marine animal that can be eaten fresh or dried and is a delicacy in many Asian cuisines.  (See the wikipedia article).  They are a valuable fishery in many areas - I met a man who dives for sea cucumbers at a breakfast place in Ketchikan, Alaska, and they're also found here.  However, not the most obvious choice for a name for a language.  In case I'd misunderstood, I asked our language trainer the next time I saw him.  Yes, he confirmed that the word "Bislama" can refer both to the national language of Vanuatu and to the sea cucumber.  (And when you look at it, you can see how "Bislama" and "bȇche de mer" sound the same).  Did he know why the language was named after the sea cucumber, I asked?  Well, he replied "Tok Pisin" and "Pijin" were both taken - so he guessed the Ni-Vanuatu thought they should have a more unique name.  Fair enough.  But still, why choose the sea cucumber as the language's namesake, of all things?  About this he wasn't sure.  My Bislama textbook*, too, makes no mention of how the language got its name, although it has plenty of other information about the language's history.  Wikipedia mentions that the word, in addition to the term "Sandlewood English", "came to be associated" with the language being spoken by Ni-Vanuatu laborers amongst themselves - these laborers harvested sea cucumbers and sandalwood among other things.   I personally enjoy imagining this "coming to be associated with" as some sort of meeting of a group of Ni-Vanuatu sitting on a beach somewhere, in which someone said "Look - the guys in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands are already calling their languages things that sound like Pidgin.  Therefore, we obviously need to name ours something different.  Sea Cucumber - that's the obvious choice."

Regardless of the language's history, Bislama is fun to learn.  Since so much of it is based on English I've picked it up more quickly than any other language I've studied - and it always feels good to be learning fast!  It was also helped along by the fact that Nick and I were in separate villages on Pele Island, so when we didn't have class we didn't see one another much.  That meant 10 days of just talking Bislama as much as I could.  Pele was a beautiful place, and many adventures were had - more posts to come on those.  But I'll leave you with a photo of where we had classes.  Life isn't too bad when your job is learning a language in a place like this.

*Bislama: An Introduction to the National Language of Vanuatu by Darrell Tryon