Sub sections:
Pidgin English and Language Transfer
Pidgin English spoken by a Chinese miner in Victoria
and the role of Language Transfer
Professor Jeff Siegel,
School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
Tuesday 7th October
12 noon–1pm
Seminar Room 2 (Rm 31), Psychology Building SO6
The forms of pidgin English spoken in Australia by Aboriginal people and Melanesian labourers have been well documented. But relatively little is known about the pidgin spoken by the more than 38,000 Chinese who came to Australia in the second half of the 19th century, mainly to work in various gold fields. Most of them originated from the Canton region of China (now known as Guangdong), where at that time Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) was an important trading language. European observers from that period have reported the use of CPE in the Northern Territory, but nowhere else.
However, a new source of data has recently been discovered – a notebook with a 16,102 word autobiographical account written in a form of English by a Chinese gold miner in the state of Victoria in the 1860s and 70s. This notebook is remarkable not only for what it tells us about CPE in Australia, but also because it was written by a Chinese speaker of the language, Jong Ah Siug, rather than by a European observer.
The first part of this talk is historical – presenting some background information about Chinese immigrants in Victoria in the second half of the 19th century, and evidence that some CPE was spoken there. It also describes Jong’s notebook and the circumstances that led to him writing it. The second part is linguistic – examining the linguistic features of CPE and other pidgins that are present in the account in the notebook, and describing some unique features of the text.
The third part is the reason why this talk is in the language and cognition series. It is concerned with language transfer – the psycholinguistic process responsible for a person using a linguistic feature from Language A when trying to speak Language B. This process is thought to be relevant to the development of contact languages such as pidgins and creoles, which often have many linguistic features similar to those of the ancestral languages of their speakers. So it is assumed that language transfer from an ancestral language (Language A) occurred at some stage when its speakers were trying to converse in the developing pidgin or creole (Language B). However, this view is very controversial, especially for pidgin languages. It turns out that some of the features of Jong’s text support particular arguments in this theoretical debate.