English language teaching has been widespread throughout modern Chinese history- it was made the country's main foreign language in 1982. Chinese Pidgin continued in use until about the end of the 19th century, when Pidgin came to be looked upon by the Chinese as humiliating (because English speakers considered it ridiculous) and so preferred to learn standard English instead.Ĭhinese Pidgin English began to decline in the late 19th century as standard English began to be taught in the country's education system. The term 'pidgin' itself is believed by some etymologists to be a corruption of the pronunciation of the English word 'business' by the Chinese. Because the English found Chinese an extremely difficult language to learn and because the Chinese held the English in low esteem and therefore disdained to learn their language, Pidgin English was developed by the English and adapted by the Chinese for business purposes. Chinese Pidgin started in Guangzhou (Canton), China, after the English established their first trading port there in 1664. Historically, it was a modified form of English developed in the 17th century for use as a trade language or lingua franca between the English and the Chinese. 'Yangjing Bang English' in Chinese (洋涇濱, or 洋泾浜) derives from the name of a former creek in Shanghai near the Bund where local workers communicated with English-speaking foreigners in pidgin (broken English). Chinese Pidgin English was spoken first in the areas of Macao and Guangzhou, later spreading north to Shanghai by the 1830s. Hu (2004: 27) puts China English at one end of a continuum where lowly Pidgin English or Chinglish is at the other. by Peter Stockwell.English first arrived in China in the 1630s, when English traders arrived in South China. Chinese English refers to varieties of English used by Chinese learners (see Kirkpatrick and Xu 2002). 1: 2013: A Hokkien-Spanish pidgin spoken in the Philippines. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, 2013. Trask, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed., ed. The emergence of so as a complementizer in Chinese Pidgin English. The result is a creole, and the children who create it are the first native speakers of the creole.' (R.L. This happens when the children in a community have nothing but a pidgin to use with other children, in which case the children take the pidgin and turn it into a real language, by fixing and elaborating the grammar and greatly expanding the vocabulary. Third, and most dramatically, it can be turned into a mother tongue. Second, it can remain in use for generations, or even centuries, as has happened with some west African pidgins. This has happened to Hawaiian pidgin, now almost entirely displaced by English, the prestige language of Hawaii. First, it may eventually drop out of use. 'There are several possible fates for a pidgin.What we know about the history and origins of existing creoles suggests that this may happen at any stage in the development of a pidgin.' (Mark Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. 'A creole comes into being when children are born into a pidgin-speaking environment and acquire the pidgin as a first language.Most pidgins are structurally simple, although if used over many generations, they do evolve, as do all languages (Aitchison, 1983 Sankoff & Laberge, 1973).' (Erika Hoff, Language Development, 5th ed., Wadsworth, 2014)

'ore than 100 pidgin languages are currently in use (Romaine, 1988).pidgin languages survive today in territories which formerly belonged to the European colonial nations, and act as lingua francas for example, West African Pidgin English is used extensively between several ethnic groups along the West African coast.' (David Crystal, English As a Global Language. In time, most pidgin languages disappear, as the pidgin-speaking community develops, and one of its established languages becomes widely known and takes over the role of the pidgin as the lingua franca, or language of choice of those who do not share a native language.' (Grover Hudson, Essential Introductory Linguistics. 'At first a pidgin language has no native speakers and is used just for doing business with others with whom one shares the pidgin language and no other.

Chinese pidgin english