In parts of the southern provinces of Western, Gulf, Central, Oro, and Milne Bay, the use of Tok Pisin has a shorter history and is less universal, especially among older people.

Over the decades, Tok Pisin has increasingly overtaken Hiri Motu as the dominant lingua franca among town-dwellers.

Papua New Guinean anglophones often call Tok Pisin "Pidgin" when speaking English.

The labourers began to develop a pidgin, drawing vocabulary primarily from English, but also from German, Malay, Portuguese, and their own Austronesian languages (perhaps especially Kuanua, that of the Tolai people of East New Britain).

This English-based pidgin evolved into Tok Pisin in German New Guinea (where the German-based creole Unserdeutsch was also spoken).

Tok Pisin and the closely related Bislama in Vanuatu and Pijin in the Solomon Islands, which developed in parallel, have traditionally been treated as varieties of a single Melanesian Pidgin English or "Neo-Melanesian" language.

The flourishing of the mainly English-based Tok Pisin in German New Guinea (despite the language of the metropolitan power being German) contrasts with Hiri Motu, the lingua franca of Papua, which was derived not from English but from Motu, the vernacular of the indigenous people of the Port Moresby area.

Along with English and Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin is one of Papua New Guinea's three official languages.

Most government documents are produced in English, but public information campaigns are often partially or entirely in Tok Pisin.

Furthermore, voiced plosives become voiceless at the ends of words, so that English pig is rendered as pik in Tok Pisin.

Several of these features derive from the common grammatical norms of Austronesian languages,[note 4] usually in a simplified form.

Although the word is thought to be derived from "he" or "is", it is not itself a pronoun or a verb but a grammatical marker used in particular constructions, e.g., Kar i tambu long hia is "car forbidden here", i.e., "no parking".

[21] Derek Bickerton's analysis of creoles, on the other hand, claims that the syntax of creoles is imposed on the grammarless pidgin by its first native speakers: the children who grow up exposed to only a pidgin rather than a more developed language such as one of the local languages or English.

Their typical characteristics found in Tok Pisin are: Many words in the Tok Pisin language are derived from English (with Australian influences), indigenous Melanesian languages, and German (part of the country was under German rule until 1919).