Perhaps CPE might have been better named and specified Cantonese Pidgin English given the use of Cantonese speech habits and pronunciations. The system here is not unlike the popular Chinese transliteration system hanyupinyin invented in the 1950s to ease the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese. ‘How much-ee dollar?’ (How much is this?)Īs transliterations, these strings of characters did not convey meaning in Cantonese but rather, they pieced together familiar Cantonese sounds to form a reasonably coherent string that phonetically resembles English words.
PIDGIN ENGLISH MANUALS
These manuals were transliterative guides for Cantonese speakers that might not look out of place in any of Hong Kong’s TVB shows today, as shown in this written sample: However, there have been texts produced through early transcription work that proved to enable speakers of Cantonese to speak Chinese Pidgin English to communicate with their English-speaking employers. CPE was a primarily oral tradition and no one really saw the need to document and immortalise it in tomes and dictionaries. Problem is, there wasn’t very much interest in learning the English language in China, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the “Chinese held the English in low esteem and therefore disdained to learn their language”. Later in the 19 th century, when there were European settlements in South China, the need for a common tongue to communicate with local workers was important too. The British first started trading in Hong Kong in the 17 th century and had to find ways to communicate with their Chinese, Cantonese-speaking counterparts in order to do good business. How did this transient tongue come about? At a time when it was a crime for people in China to teach their language to foreigners-especially Westerners-the British were keen to do trade with East Asia. Creoles can be understood to have native speakers who use the language for everyday purposes, beyond the purposes it originally served, and are more fully developed and stable in terms of grammar and habits of use. Some former pidgins that have developed long enough to have native speakers-and thus become creoles-are Hawaiian Creole, Singlish, Jamaican Creole, and Tok Pisin.
Chinese Pidgin EnglishĬPE (also known as China Coast Pidgin) is the typical example of a pidgin, made famous because it never expanded beyond its sphere of use as a trade language around the 18 th–19 th centuries to become anyone’s first language-unlike creoles-and didn’t last beyond that time. So let’s take a look at the very pidgin that gave rise to this train of thought. Given the nature of pidgins as trade languages that facilitated business-related interactions between distinct groups of speech communities, this sounds like a logical deduction. Other theories state that the word was derived from the Cantonese words for ‘pay money’, that is bei2 cin4 (畀錢).
Which “Chinese” language it refers to here, however, remains vague and unaccounted for-not unlike the other hypotheses on the genesis of the word “pidgin”. If you look up the word pidgin online, you’ll come to understand that it likely came into being in the late 19 th century from the “ Chinese transliteration of the English word business” ( Online Etymology Dictionary).
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