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Towards an atlas of the pidgins and creoles of the Pacific area

Language atlases would seem to have a number of distinct functions, including a. displaying what is known about the languages of an area; b. revealing gaps in such knowledge; c. directing researchers toward problems associated with the areal distribution of languages; d. serving as a way of disseminating specialist knowledge to a lay audience and/or speakers of the languages mapped; e. helping governments and educational and business organizations to optimize communication. In other words, it is important to realize that atlases (or language maps) are much more than the pretty pictures they are sometimes taken for. I have discussed several spinoffs of atlas making for (socio)linguistic theory elsewhere (Mühlhäusler forthcoming) so I shall concentrate on practical matters in the present paper. To date we can distinguish two stages in the mapping of the pidgins and Creoles of the Pacific area: (a) Hancock's (1981) map of the pidgins of the world, which lists a large number of Pacific varieties and (b) Wurm and Hattori's Language Atlas-Pacific Area (1981: part 1, 1983: part 2), which contains two pidgin maps (Map 24: Pidgin Languages. Trade Languages and Lingue Franche in Oceania and Australia; Map 46: Pidgin Languages, Trade Languages and Lingue Franche in the Philippines and Mainland and Insular South-East Asia). In his review of these maps Frake (1984: 5-6) draws attention to a number of problems and shortcomings, though he emphasizes the overall importance of such information to pidgin and Creole studies: