Its use spread from master-servant relationships to those between English and Chinese traders and bureaucrats. Chinese Pidgin English ( Chinglish), developed in the 17th century in Canton (Guandong), China,and survived for almost three centuries. The same is true of Pidgin French which disappeared from Vietnam after the French left the country. For instance, Pidgin Russian spoken in Manchuria disappeared when Russian settlers left China after World War II. They disappear when the reason for communication diminishes, as communities either move apart, one community learns the language of the other, or both communities learn a common language (usually the official language of the country). There are other theories about the origin of the term.īecause of their limited function, pidgin languages usually do not last very long, rarely more than several decades. The word, first attested in print in 1850, is thought to be the Chinese mispronunciation of the English word business. The term pidgin has nothing to do with birds.
A good example of a non-European pidgin is the Chinook Jargon that was once used by American Indians and European traders in the Pacific Northwest. However, there are also pidgins spoken in parts of Africa, South America, and southeast Asia that are based on languages other than those of the colonial powers. For example, the establishment of plantation economies in the Caribbean, with large groups of slaves from different language backgrounds who came from West Africa, gave rise to a number of pidgins based on English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. The major languages are usually the languages of the former major colonial powers, such as English, French, and Portuguese. Usually a pidgin language is a blend of the vocabulary of one major language with the grammar of one or more other languages. Nobody speaks a pidgin as their first language. The book should prove beneficial to sociolinguists of varying persuasions, especially creolists, variationists, and discourse analysts.Pidgins are “on-the-spot” languages that develop when people with no common language come into contact with each other. The included CD contains sociodemographic data for all the informants and background information on the texts, translations, and sound samples.
To help the reader navigate the vast amount of data, there are several maps, sample questionnaires, and complete transcriptions from elicitations and interviews. Issues related to both corpus and status planning are discussed (cf. One of the obvious issues is the functioning of the variety in new public formal domains. It is also comparable with the discussions of urban varieties of creoles reported in Patrick's ( 1999) work and more recently in Hackert 2004. Deuber's report on the use of NPE in Lagos makes for interesting comparison with the spread and use of other contact varieties in urban areas in Africa (e.g., Sheng in Nairobi see Fink 2005 and references therein) and its impact on indigenous languages. This is a corpus-based study of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) among the educated in the urban center of Lagos.
Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting.
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