[9] Most speakers of Unserdeutsch are bilingual; speaking either Standard German, English, Tok Pisin or Kuanua.
[16] Grammatically, Unserdeutsch bears many similarities to L2 varieties of German, suggesting incomplete language acquisition on the part of students in the German-speaking colony.
[22] This tendency extends even to imperative sentences and yes/no questions, which demonstrates a strong substrate influence from Tok Pisin.
[22] Furthermore, even WH-fronting is optional in Unserdeutsch,[17] and these types of interrogatives often come at the end of a sentence, as in Tok Pisin, rather than at the beginning as in Standard German or English.
[34] Many of the distinguishing characteristics of Standard German verbs, such as separable prefixes, second- and third-person stem change and the strong/weak distinction, are not present in Unserdeutsch.
There is no overt preterite in Unserdeutsch,[17] but a generalized past tense can be indicated through the use of the uninflected verb hat ('have') alongside a highly regularized German participle form, which is constructed by the addition of the prefix ge- to the infinitive.
[38] Unusually for a creole language,[35] Unserdeutsch has a copula which is, by contrast to the rest of the verb system, conjugated in present tense.
[42] Command statements are formed identically to declarative clauses, and unlike English or German (but similar to Tok Pisin) these constructions retain SVO word order.
[46] Unserdeutsch uses a hybrid system of personal pronouns, demonstrating heavy influence from both the substrate and lexifier languages.
[48] Two pronouns, first-person plural wi and third-person singular masculine er, have distinct object forms (uns and ihm, respectively), reflecting Standard German pronominal case marking.
[49] The third-person pronouns mark biological sex only, and there is no equivalent to the German or English neuter forms.
[48] There are no formal pronouns in Unserdeutsch, perhaps reflecting non-European cultural conceptions of friendship and acquaintance in the South Pacific.
[52] The second-person singular du can be used in place of the Standard German impersonal pronoun man, mirroring English usage.
[51] The Unserdeutsch possessive pronouns, while outwardly similar to their Standard German counterparts, do not take case, gender or number endings.
[37] Thus: A handful of high frequency adjectives, such as gut, retain their Standard German suppletive forms (such as besser and beste).
[54][53][17] The first of these forms uses a preposition, fi, to express possession, similar to the Tok Pisin bilong construction.
The second form simply juxtaposes the possessor immediately before the item possessed, as is found is many dialects of German.