Papua New Guinea's struggle for development is intimately bound up with the history of Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin which is the product of nineteenth-century colonialism in the Pacific. The language has since become the most important lingua franca in the region, being spoken by morethan a million people in a highly multilingual society. Suzanne Romaine examines some of the changes that are taking place in Tok Pisin as it becomes the native language of the younger generation of rural and urban speakers. These linguistic processes, which are by no means complete, have to beunderstood in the socio-historical context of colonial expansion and strategies for socio-economic development in the post-colonial era.