Reconstructing Chinese Pidgin English phonology on the basis of written sources

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at outlining the phonology of Chinese Pidgin English, including its syllable structure, with an emphasis on the onset and the coda. Since Chinese Pidgin English is an extinct variety, the only available sources are written records such as magazine articles (e.g. in The Chinese Repository), literary works, travelogues, and letters. Reconstructing the phonology of Chinese Pidgin English on the basis of the orthography used in these sources raises the issues of the reliability of the sources and of the methodological implications. These are addressed in light of the caveats formulated by Mühlhäusler (1997), Baker and Winer (1999), Avram (2000), among others. In line with the principle of sociolinguistic accountability, all tokens in the samples of Chinese Pidgin English are included in the analysis as well as all the contexts where they might have appeared. In addition, a comparison will be made with other contemporary records of Chinese Pidgin English, with the phonology of Hong Kong English (Setter et al. 2010) and with the L2 phonology of Chinese learners of English. Such a comparison is certainly not the perfect equivalent of Rickford’s (1986) “feedback from current usage”, given that Chinese Pidgin English is no longer spoken. However, this approach is warranted by the so-called “uniformitarian principle” (Labov 1972), which posits that current patterns are similar to those that operated in the past.