Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Tok Pisin is spoken in Papua New Guinea (PNG) as the largest lingua franca. There are regional and sociolinguistic variations, but all are mutually comprehensible. Tok Pisin is characterized by a simplified English-based phonology of five core vowels and 17 core consonant phonemes. The orthography is English and is both transparent and consistent. The suprasegmental features and phonotactic rules are derived from PNG vernacular languages and German. The one study of children’s acquisition of Tok Pisin consonants shows a core phonology with wide variation arising from the impact of local languages and emerging phonemes used in borrowed words. Tok Pisin research has previously focused on descriptive linguistics. There are no training courses or establishments for speech-language pathology in PNG. Current speech assessments and therapies are mainly informal and unpublished.</jats:p>