Notes on children's secret language games in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

Secret languages play an important role in Melanesian communities. Tradition-ally, they are more commonly found among men who want to keep their secrets from uninitiated social groups. This chapter, in contrast, presents secret language codes primarily used by school girls in New Ireland – three language games that can be played in many local languages, in Tok Pisin and in English. Schools, often accommodating children from various linguistic backgrounds, harbour a crea-tive environment for the development of language games and their spread within the province, and apparently also further into the country. This chapter will also focus on how young speakers deal with applying a fixed set of game rules to a variety of phonotactically unlike languages.