This book shifts the focus of Pidgin and Creole Studies from the better-known Atlantic/Caribbean contexts to the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and Mongolia. By looking at Asian contexts before and after Western colonial expansion, we offer readers insights into language contact in historical settings and with empirical features substantially different from those that have shaped the theory of the field. Two pidgin varieties of the Far East are described in detail, namely Chinese-Pidgin Russian and China Coast Pidgin. The former offers a unique opportunity to observe the typological dynamics of contact between Slavic, Tungusic and Sinitic, while the latter presents one of the better-documented studies of any pidgin so far. The third contribution is an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese India slave trade in relation to contact phenomena. The remaining two chapters look at Southeast Asia and discuss Malayo-Portuguese Creoles and the ubiquitous Malay-Sinitic lingua franca respectively. From a linguistic perspective the diversity of language families, the historical time depth, the complex patterns of population movements, and the wealth of contact phenomena that define Asia are so many and at times still so little understood that no single volume could ever pretend to shed sufficient light on all these aspects of the region. Despite providing what can be seen as a sample platter of the field of contact linguistics in this part of the world, the in-depth analysis of exotic socio-historical settings, the typologically diverse and rich data sets, and the notions of pidgins and Creoles as applied here will nonetheless stretch the limits and limitations of current theories in the field, and are a must read for anyone interested in arriving at solid theoretical generalizations. Published earlier as Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 25:1, 2010.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A much needed corrective to all the erroneous ideas based on the assumption that creole means Atlantic creole. — John Holm
[T]he contributions in this study provide many fascinating examples of how important it is to understand the social histories of the speakers […]. — Charles E. Grimes, Australian National University, Canberra, in Studies in Language Vol. 37:2 (2013)
A valuable resource for anyone interested in language contact, covering a wide range of contexts from the linguistically diverse Asian region. The complex patterns of language contact in this previously under-represented area provide important new insights into pidgin and creole genesis. — Jeff Siegel
Interest in pidgin and creole languages dates back some 200 years but the significance of such studies for main-stream linguistics remains unknown. […] The volume under review, apart from illustrating the richness of the Asian world in terms of pidgins and creoles, has certainly added more information, and this pioneering effort by Umberto Ansaldo will thus be of interest to scholars working in the field of contact linguistics generally, as well as to specialists in areas such as the relexification of languages, language leveling, and the typology of pidgins and creoles. — Gunter Schaarschmidt, University of Victoria, Canada, in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Volume 58.3, 2016
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