Abstract

This thesis explores the attitudes of university students toward Pijin, a Melanesian Creole that is the de facto national language, and English, the official language of the country, in Honiara, the capital city of Solomon Islands. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2007 on the Solomon Island Campus of the University of the South Pacific (USP), it draws on the concepts of language ideologies and creolization to show that students' linguistic attitudes and behaviours are informed by different ideological influences, which coexist, compete and combine in complex ways. The research argues that, in a post-colonial context where national consciousness is growing, the residual but pervasive effect of the colonial ideology which disparages Pijin as "broken English" is in fact detrimental to the practice of English, a language of high instrumental value for social mobility in Solomon Islands. The tensions that students experience in classrooms with regard to their language practices reveal larger contradictions, related to current processes of nation building and class differentiation, in which Solomon students, as the future elite of a young nation-state, are enmeshed.