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Article: Getting it wrong in Papua New Guinea.(The Pacific)
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- December 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN DAYS OF OLD in Papua New Guinea, white men were generally addressed by non-English-speaking Papua New Guineans as "masta". Today this honorific is infrequently heard; where a foreigner is known well, his first name is universally used. Where there is no bond of familiarity; say, in a shop or a taxi, a Tok Pisin speaker is likely to address a foreign man as "boss", although "mate" is also widely used in application to those obviously of Australian or New Zealand origin.
In the 1980s, a time when foreign personnel were being rapidly replaced with locals as managers on the coffee plantations of the Wahgi Valley, there were daily enquiries regarding any upcoming ...