![]() ![]() ![]() 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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