Instead of assuming any definitive parameters of pidgin, this article positions the meanings of pidgin English in specific historical contexts and explores how and by whom this language variety was defined and discussed. But in this article I choose to historicize this language and consider "pidgin" as a variable concept that is constantly and rapidly changing along with history. In contrast to the concurrent linguistic trend of Romanizing and alphabetizing Chinese led by European missionaries and Chinese intellectuals, 5 the creation and development of pidgin gestured toward a less-recognized history of what I call "Sinicizing European languages."Īccording to its conventional definition, CPE is a mixed language made up mostly "of English words, sometimes with a bit of Hindi or Portuguese, set to Chinese grammar and pronunciation" ( Platt 2018: 2). 4 I will instead argue that Chinese people, especially subalterns, displayed tremendous creativity and innovation in utilizing the Chinese writing system and regional topolects to mediate, transform, and reproduce foreign languages to accommodate their own communicative, literary, and social needs. 2 By foregrounding the intermediary role of sinographs and Chinese topolects ( fangyan 方言) in the formation and development of CPE, 3 this article not only interrogates the dominance of the English language in the nineteenth century but also challenges the long-held assumption that sinographs are inadequate for expressing sound because of their nonphonographic nature (i.e., China's lack of an alphabet).
Engaging with the lexicographical and literary texts of CPE in Chinese, this article provides an alternative point of view from which to reread the history of CPE and to theoretically complement current language contact and World Englishes approaches to pidgins, which often give more weight to the superstrate or lexifier language (European languages-especially English) than the substrate language (non-European languages) and tend to assume that pidgins and creoles are localized and simplified, if not distorted, forms of their lexifiers. This article, however, problematizes the concept of pidgin English and questions the idea that this language is a corrupted language subordinated to English. 1 And in the case of CPE, its "strangeness" has further been ridiculed and taken as a mark of the inferiority and stubbornness of Chinese in English-language publications since the eighteenth century ( Spence 1998: 54–55 St.
The racist overtones in the word pidgin are thus palpable: the term is rooted in the history of European expansion and colonialism, manifesting a Eurocentric point of view that considers this form of contact language as a mere aberrant variety of a European language in a non-European society. Hence, the nomenclature of this language is closely associated with the representation of non-European society and language in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel accounts. The term is believed to stem from how Cantonese speakers mispronounced the word business ( Baker and Mühlhäusler 1990) in their early contacts with Europeans, and it has since then been taken to refer not only to the trade jargon spoken in Canton but more broadly to all "broken" languages "that emerged out of sporadic interactions between speakers of European languages and those of non-European languages, in European trade and settlement colonies" ( Mufwene 2020). The "unusual" sound and linguistic features of pidgin never failed to surprise early European traders who traveled to the southern coast of China, and the term pidgin itself embodies their uncanny auditory experience. Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) emerged and developed around the Canton area as a lingua franca between Chinese and Euro-American traders during their early contacts in the eighteenth century.
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