Manchurian Pidgin Chinese: A Chinese-based Pidgin Spoken in Northeast China

Abstract

The half-century endemic warfare between Japan and China since 1894, which led to the Japanese occupation and colonization of Northeast China, had given rise to an opportunity of intercultural communication between different groups of population, and a short-lived pidgin is reportedly to be a “possible” occurrence in the colonized area (Mühlhäusler & Trew, 1996). However, relatively little is known or documented about such pidgin by western scholarship, especially in terms of linguistic perspective. This paper presents linguistic data of a Mandarin Chinese-lexified pidgin called Manchurian Pidgin Chinese, also known as kyowagō, spoken between Chinese and Japanese in the colonized Northeast China. The data presented were recovered from historical materials, mainly recorded by Japanese scholars and journalists at the time. In addition, this essay provides the sociohistorical context and raises several intriguing phonological and morphosyntactic features observed from the data. The paper starts by cataloguing and describing the existing sources of linguistic data of the pidgin. One of the earliest direct records of discourse is from an article called ‘Japanese-Chinese Mixed Conversation’ written by Watarai (1918), which showcases the pidgin as spoken by Japanese. In addition, Sakurai (2015) transcribed the old newspaper articles and a pamphlet written by Nakatani (1925, 1926), a sinologist and a translator, who attempted to address what he coined as ‘Japanese-Chinese Collaborative Language’, which he prescriptively reckoned as ‘incorrect Chinese’. The pedagogical materials assiduously recorded the pidgin at first-hand. Comprehensively documented using Chinese characters, transliteration and phonetic annotation, his works serve as a robust source for us to understand how the pidgin was spoken at the time. There is also a striking uniformity and resemblance among the attestation of this pidgin found in other sources such as newspaper articles, comic postcards, novels and memoirs. These data can be used for linguistic analysis. Aside from the direct records of the pidgin, the paper also combines relevant demographic and historical literature to illustrate the linguistic ecology of the Northeast China region. This paper also aims at identifying and describing several phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena of the pidgin found in the available data. With the phonetic transcription, the paper attempts to reconstruct the phonemic inventory, the treatment of tones and phonotactic constraints, primarily those of Japanese speakers. Several morphosyntactic features will be highlighted, including the use of SOV word order, constituent order of negation, aspect particle have, possessive pronouns as personal pronouns, etc. The paper also discusses the ubiquitous presence of productive reduplication, which was found to be typically absent or infrequent among pidgins (Bakker, 2003). The paper discusses the functions of reduplication in Manchurian Pidgin Chinese, including intensification, attenuation, and creating indefinite relative pronouns. This paper aims at collecting the available data of Manchurian Pidgin Chinese, providing a sociohistorical description and preliminary grammatical sketch on some of its linguistic features, especially the ones that are atypical to pidgins. The paper seeks to expand our existing understanding of pidgin by introducing this relatively less documented pidgin with historical and linguistic scrutiny.