Papua New Guinea (PNG), with its 842 languages among its roughly 3.8 million inhabitants, constitutes the most linguistically complex society in the world. Of the various lingua francas used in PNG for communication among speakers of different languages, the English-based Melanesian pidgin Tok Pisin—originally brought to PNG in the late 1800s by New Guinean laborers from plantations on Samoa—has become a national language and one of the most widely used language varieties in the country. As a pidgin, it is mostly used as a second language (L2), although it is increasingly becoming a native language (L1) of many younger generation speakers. This nativization of Tok Pisin has been less an object of study than its use as a lingua franca.