Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin WILLIAM A. FOLEY wT* Eastern" '- Papua New Guinea ^Australia 1. Introduction Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin (autoglossonym: karam taygwapasambi malaldk, literally ‘talk for turning and conversing’, Tok Pisin tainim tok) is/was spoken in the villages along the Arafundi River in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. It is/ was spoken in villages speaking two unrelated native languages, Yimas and Arafundi, and the population of these villages cur rently is around a thousand (Yimas villages, c.250, Arafundi vil lages, c.750), but it was never spoken by more than a handful of men in each of these villages, those who had the clan-based right to carry on trading relationships with men in villages speaking the other language, and there were never any speakers outside of the Yimas and Arafundi villages. Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin is now extremely endangered, at least moribund, and quite prob ably extinct. I suspect it has been moribund since at least the 1960s. The official language of Papua New Guinea is English, but in the isolated and rural area in which the Pidgin was spoken the practical everyday language of contact is now Tok Pisin. Not only is Tok Pisin the cause of the probable extinction of Yimas- Arafundi Pidgin, it is well on its way to killing off Yimas itself, as it too now has no speakers under 30, and an estimated total of speakers of 50 out of a population of 250. Arafundi, on the other hand, for the moment still seems vi able, particularly in the very isolated villages up in the moun tains which form the source of the Arafundi River. It needs to be noted that the corpus on which this sketch is based is rather small: four texts, a short lexicon and some grammatical notes, as work on the Pidgin was a quite peripheral interest during my fieldwork in the area. The Pidgin unfortunately was also discov ered late in my fieldwork period, quite serendipitously in fact: on overhearing a couple of men from the A rafu n d i-sp eak in g vil lage of Auwim, who had come to Yimas village to trade. Prior to this I had had no inkling of the pervasive role of pidgin lan guages in the trading networks of Yimas village. Hence there are many gaps in my knowledge and documentation o f the lan guage, and it is highly unlikely that any further fieldwork now could ameliorate the situation given its current status. 2. Sociohistorical background The Sepik region of Papua New Guinea is highly linguistically diverse, and in precontact times facility in more than one’s na tive language was essential in carrying out the regular commer cial exchange relationships among villages that are so typical of the area. Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin was derived from Yimas and Arafundi, two adjoining languages along the Arafundi River in this region. It is actually one of a family ofYimas-based pidgins used by male Yimas villagers in their trading relations with neighbouring groups. There are at least three others (Williams 2000), but Yimas is the dominant lexifier language in all of them (see Foley 1991 for a grammar ofYimas). 105