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Quantifying the grammatical impact of substrata languages on Pidgin word order: The influence of Japanese and Korean on Bamboo English

  • The Japanese Language Association of Korea
  • Abbr : JLAK
  • 2023, (75), pp.5-28
  • DOI : 10.14817/jlak.2023.75.5
  • Publisher : The Japanese Language Association Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Published : March 20, 2023

Daniel Long 1

1東京都立大学

Irregular Papers

ABSTRACT

In the mid 20th century an English-based pidgin commonly referred to Bamboo English was used first in post-war occupied Japan by American military and Japanese locals, and later on the Korean peninsula as American soldiers and local people there had increasing contact. No in-depth studies of it have been published mainly because of the paucity of linguistic data. This paper seeks to shed light on its grammatical structure through quantitative analyses, namely producing three scatter plots and thrice calculating Pearson’s r correlation coefficients. These are made for 44 individual sentences in Bamboo English, with the x values being the sequential numbers of the morphemes in the original Bamboo English sentence and the y values being the re-ordered numbers of morphemes in the Standard English, Japanese and Korean translations, respectively. The results showed that the majority of the BE sentences were grammatically similar (similar morpheme order) to English. This is to be expected since, after all, BE is pidginized English and not pidginized Japanese or pidginized Korean. Nonetheless seven (or around 15%) of the 44 sentences had morpheme order which is unexplainable by English. Many (though significantly all of these) do indeed seem to reflect the syntactic influence of the substrata (i.e. Japanese and Korean) languages. Finally, we note that BE differs from many pidgins worldwide in that we do not find “tertiary usage”, that is BE was not used a lingua franca by Japanese and Koreans to communicate with one another. Nonetheless, it is possible that the strong grammatical influence of the substrata languages on this pidgin may be due to the morpheme order similarities inherent in Japanese and Korean.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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