Papua New Guinea (PNG), with its 842 languages among its roughly 3.8 million inhabitants, constitutes the most linguistically complex society in the world. Of the various lingua francas used in PNG for communication among speakers of different languages, the English-based Melanesian pidgin Tok Pisin—originally brought to PNG in the late 1800s by New Guinean laborers from plantations on Samoa—has become a national language and one of the most widely used language varieties in the country. As a pidgin, it is mostly used as a second language (L2), although it is increasingly becoming a native language (L1) of many younger generation speakers. This nativization of Tok Pisin has been less an object of study than its use as a lingua franca.

The present book seeks to fill this knowledge gap. The author selected 536 native speaker informants of Tok Pisin between 10 and 19 years old from three different areas in PNG. Interviews were carried out in single-sex pairs, yielding about 50 hours of recorded speech. He quantified the variation of a number of aspects of Tok Pisin phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse, contrasting the findings of the four areas among themselves and at times with findings from previous studies. The major strengths of the data presentation and discussion are the high quality and quantity of the data, as well as the wealth of the examples included.

The conclusion contains a discussion of the substrate and superstrate influences, as well as the main findings. Smith finds varying degrees of such influence, with caveats. Additionally, he discovers a general phonological mainstreaming and strong evidence of grammaticalization attributable to Ll acquisition (p. 201). However, a systematic comparison between the varieties of his L1 informants and those of L2 informants of previous studies is not undertaken. This well-edited volume is a welcome addition to the studies on Tok Pisin and is sure to stimulate much comparative research in the future.