Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2010

The much-understudied Chinese Pidgin Russian (CPR) has existed at the Chinese–Russian border since at least the 18th century. Unlike many Western-based pidgins, it was formed in a territory where the lexifying language (Russian) was dominant. It also uses a typical inflecting language as its lexifier and an isolating language (Chinese) as its substrate. This paper considers the influence of both ‘parent’ languages at all CPR levels. The sources of CPR include: pidgin records and descriptions; ‘Russian’ textbooks compiled for the Chinese going to Russia; and works of literature depicting contacts between the Russians and indigenous peoples of Siberia, who often spoke a variety of CPR. Some of these sources are rarely accessible to Western linguists. The paper discusses all key aspects of CPR: history (both of the pidgin and its study), phonology (segmental inventory, stress, tone), morphology (verbs vs. non-verbs, final particles), syntax (syntactic roles, sentence and phrase word order, postpositions and prepositions, comparatives), and vocabulary (synonyms, loanwords, structural and semantic calques, ‘diminutive politeness’). The study provides new translations and etymologies for ‘difficult’ CPR words and sentences.

In this paper we revisit some long-standing questions regarding the origins and structure of China Coast Pidgin (CCP), also known as Chinese Pidgin English. We first review the historical context of the China Trade which formed the ecology for the development of CCP. We then review the available sources, focusing on newly transcribed data from Chinese-language instructional materials. These sources provide fresh evidence for grammatical structure in CCP, and demonstrate strong influence from Cantonese as the major substrate language. Comparison with English-language sources shows systematic contrasts which point to likely variation between Anglophone and Sinophone lects, as in the case of wh-questions which show regular wh-fronting in English sources and pervasive use of wh-in-situ in Chinese sources. This conclusion helps to resolve the debate over the Sinitic features of CCP.

This article is primarily concerned with quantifying the African(-born) population in the early Portuguese settlements in India and defining its linguistic profile, as a means to understand the extent and limitations of its impact on the emerging Indo-Portuguese creoles. Apart from long-established commercial links (including the slave trade) between East Africa and India, which could have facilitated linguistic interchange between the two regions, Smith (1984) and Clements (2000) also consider that the long African sojourn of all those travelling the Cape Route may have transported an African-developed pidgin to Asia. In this article, I concentrate on population displacement brought about by the slave trade. Published sources and data uncovered during archival research permit a characterisation of the African population in terms of (a) their numbers (relative to the overall population), (b) their origin, and (c) their position within the colonial social scale. The scenario that emerges for most territories of Portuguese India is that of a significant slave population distributed over the colonial households in small numbers, in what is best described as a ‘homestead society’ (Chaudenson 1992, 2001). It is also made evident that there was a steady influx of slave imports well into the 19th century, and that the Bantu-speaking regions of modern-day Mozambique were the primary sources of slaves for the trade with Portuguese India.

This paper is concerned with the nature of etymological gender inflection in Malacca Creole Portuguese and its place in the diachrony of the language. The discussion considers pairs of items with etymological gender inflection and human referents. Speaker intuitions of the word-pair vitality are assessed by word recognition and judgments of the acceptability of test words in specific syntactic contexts. The items surveyed are initially contemplated as a type of derivational morphology. Subsequently, the question is posed as to whether this etymological gender morphology could have a contextual dimension, and it is observed that some limited traces thereof may be found. The incorporation and retention of etymological gender inflection is attributed to second language input to the creole, involving early second language lexical and phrasal development, influenced by a combination of communication pragmatics, salience, and potential Indian substrate features. It is suggested that such input could be both an early diachronic occurrence or could have arisen through an ongoing diglossia involving a wider lectal grid that may have existed until the 19th century.

Bazaar Malay is a Malay-lexified pidgin with a Chinese substratum spoken in the marketplace of Singapore (and elsewhere in Southeast Asia). Although it is no longer a lingua franca in Singapore today, it is nevertheless still spoken by older Singaporeans. Like Chinese and Malay, Bazaar Malay is a topic-prominent language. We document three types of the Bazaar Malay topic construction and show that they are identical to the topic structures found in Chinese. The degree of convergence in the topic construction between Chinese and Bazaar Malay, and between Chinese and Singapore English, supports the systemic view of substratum transfer.