8 - Pidgin ecologies of the China coast

Summary

Englishman no can talkee Chinee, he no plenty smart inside. Allo Chinaman talkee Englishee all plopa – all-same my

Charles Leland (1892 : 111)

In this chapter we turn our attention to Southern China, where speakers of Asian-Portuguese, English (and other Western) vernaculars, and Sinitic varieties came into contact for the purpose of trade. Because of the extremely protectionist nature of the Chinese empire, and due to the fierce competition between Portuguese, Dutch, and British trading companies, the contacts between the Eastern and Western parties were in fact very limited in nature and confined to few social settings, as already seen in the history of Macau (section 3.4 and chapter 7). Moreover, most of the official contacts were regulated by a small group of intermediaries. In such confined contexts, limited contacts centred around very specific interests such as commerce often led to the formation of so-called ‘pidgin’ languages. These are restricted codes that serve the purpose of basic communication in a specialized field, as in the case of Russenorsk, a Norwegian–Russian pidgin spoken in the periodic settlements of the northern Norwegian coast between Russian and Norwegian whalers. In Southern China, a unique contact ecology evolved around the Pearl River Delta between the city-ports of Macau and Canton (now Guangzhou, see map 8.1). For a long time this was the only area officially accessible to Western ships and it constituted the nexus of the trade between Southeast Asia and Japan as well as the centre of the commerce between Europe and the Far East.