atlas of pidgin and creole language structures

From a linguistic perspective the diversity of language families, the historical time depth, the complex patterns of population movements, and the wealth of contact phenomena that define Asia are so many and at times still so little understood that no single volume could ever pretend to shed sufficient light on all these aspects of the region. The remaining two chapters look at Southeast Asia and discuss Malayo-Portuguese Creoles and the ubiquitous Malay-Sinitic lingua franca respectively.

The third contribution is an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese India slave trade in relation to contact phenomena. The former offers a unique opportunity to observe the typological dynamics of contact between Slavic, Tungusic and Sinitic, while the latter presents one of the better-documented studies of any pidgin so far. Two pidgin varieties of the Far East are described in detail, namely Chinese-Pidgin Russian and China Coast Pidgin.

By looking at Asian contexts before and after Western colonial expansion, we offer readers insights into language contact in historical settings and with empirical features substantially different from those that have shaped the theory of the field.

Description: This book shifts the focus of Pidgin and Creole Studies from the better-known Atlantic/Caribbean contexts to the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and Mongolia.

Atlas of pidgin and creole language structures