Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Chinese Pidgin Russian (autoglossonyms: lomanəj jazyk or lomanəj ruskij, literally ‘broken language’, ‘broken Russian’) was spoken between the last decades of the 18th and the middle of the 20th century in the vast territories along the Russian-Chinese border in southern Siberia and the Russian Far East, and also in northern China in the city of Harbin and along the Chinese Far East Railway built by Russia in Manchuria in 1903. This pidgin has been extinct for several decades already, but some elderly (over 70 years old) representatives of Siberian minorities can still be considered semi-speakers of Chinese Pidgin Russian. Their number is probably about 50 people. It is difficult to say to what extent the modern pidgin which has recently appeared in the course of the shuttle trade on the Russian-Chinese border is connected with the old pidgin that is the subject of this chapter.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

Chinese Pidgin Russian arose in the course of Russian trade with China and Russian colonization of southern Siberia. The colonization of Siberia differed from the Western colonization of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas: Contacts with local ethnic groups were primarily restricted to trade and the collection of fur taxes. There was no mass resettling of people of different nations who would have to use Pidgin as the unique means of communication. This explains why Russian-based pidgins were never creolized.

     The first Russian-based pidgin to be observed was the “Kyakhta language” (or “Maimachin dialect”) on the border of the current Buryat Republic and Mongolia. The existence of a peculiar “trade language” on the border with China was first mentioned by George Timkowsky (Timkowsky 1827.II). The Kyakhta language was soon noticed by linguists (N. Bichurin, S. Chrepanov, A. Aleksandrov, H. Schuchardt, S. Bulich). It was deliberately standardized by the Chinese: All merchants dealing with Russia had to learn “the Russian language”, using phrase books and dictionaries where Russian words were transcribed with Chinese characters (Flug 1935). The Kyakhta variant was therefore probably the only Russian-based pidgin that acquired a “de facto” norm.

     The origin of the Kyakhta language is disputable. There is some evidence that it was brought to Kyakhta by Russian merchants who used a Russian-based pidgin before in contacts with other ethnic groups, including contacts in the White Sea area (Nichols 1996: 240) or speakers of Uralic or Altaic languages (Kozinskij 1974, Perekhvalskaya 2006). According to another point of view, it was a result of the relexification of an old Mongolian-based trade pidgin.

     At any rate, carriers of a Russian-based pidgin in the 18th–20th centuries were Russian merchants, fur tax collectors, members of the religious sect of Old Believers, Cossacks, adventurers, and officials. They brought it to new territories which were gradually added to the Russian Empire: the basin of the Amur river, the Ussuri region, and later to the Chinese territory along the Chinese Eastern Railway and the city of Harbin. Chinese Pidgin Russian became the lingua franca of the big cities of the region (Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Harbin) where there were large Russian and Chinese communities. In the 1920s, the number of Chinese in Vladivostok was estimated to be 30,000; they were mostly workers and small retailers. Chinese Pidgin Russian was the main means of communication between the communities.

     After the 1930s, the mass migration of Russians from the European part of the USSR to rural areas of Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Far East transformed the local ethnic groups into small minorities. The newcomers did not use and, most probably, did not know any Pidgin; they spoke standard Russian to Pidgin speakers. Chinese Pidgin Russian then entered the phase of a post-pidgin continuum. Pidgin forms began to be substituted by those which were closer to standard Russian. Still, the Russian speech of older representatives of the local ethnic minorities displays obvious residual pidgin features.

     The Chinese population was deported from the USSR in the late 1930s, so Chinese Pidgin Russian lost its importance as a lingua franca. The urban variety soon disappeared completely.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

Chinese Pidgin Russian was a means of communication between “European” and “Asian” groups. Europeans belonged to the upper strata of the society: officials, superiors, house owners in the cities; administrators, doctors, and teachers in rural areas. The European community consisted of Russians and other ethnic groups (Ukrainians, Poles, Germans). The Europeans regarded Pidgin as a primitive means of communication solely reserved for “Asians”. The latter were Chinese in the cities and trading centers, and also Tungusic people in the countryside.

     Chinese migration to Russia was entirely male; women were not allowed to leave the Celestial Empire. In the Russian territory, Chinese men married Nanai, Udihe, or Evenki women. The means of communication in these mixed families was a simplified form of Chinese. Marriages of Chinese men with European women were very rare. Thus, there were no conditions for the creolization of Chinese Pidgin Russian.

     As for gender-related use of the Pidgin, the situation was different for European and Asian communities. Chinese contacts with Russians were carried out exclusively by men; among Tungusic groups, men also had more opportunities to interact with Europeans. Women were either monolingual or bilingual, speaking the language of the neighbouring group. By contrast, European women were fully integrated into the interaction with other groups, especially with Chinese men, who were often hired as workers.

     During World War II and later on, males of ethnic minorities began to be conscripted into the Soviet military service. As a result, men began to speak more Russified forms of Pidgin. Therefore, women became the predominant users of Chinese Pidgin Russian. Nowadays, the majority of semi-speakers of Pidgin are old women of Udihe, Nanai, or Evenki origin.

     The available data on Chinese Pidgin Russian are a collection of documents and recordings made over a significant period of time in a rather vast area. Certain details of grammar and lexicon differ in different sources, so the spread of a particular feature may be limited to a certain territory or epoch. However, the amount of common features makes it possible to refer to Chinese Pidgin Russian as basically one language which existed in several varieties.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

Chinese Pidgin Russian has a vowel system of seven vowels (see Table 1). Central vowels present a complete set for all degrees of aperture: /ɯ/, /ə/, and /a/. There are no contexts where [ɯ] and [ə] would be opposed. /ɯ/ is usual in words of Russian and Chinese origin: [‘sɯnka] ‘son’; [tata’dɯ] ‘big, large’. It is always stressed; [ə] is unstressed and appears frequently between groups of consonants. In words of Russian origin, it corresponds to reduced variants of vowels: [tə'ri] ‘three’, [kə'rasinə] ‘red’, [gu'magə] ‘paper’.

     Chinese Pidgin Russian has 18 consonants, listed in Table 2. Allophonic variants are given in parentheses, and special spelling counterparts are in angle brackets.

Voiceless plosives have an aspirated variant mainly in the Chinese ethnolect. Uvular [q] and [χ] substitute for velar [k] and [x] before /a/ and back vowels in variants characteristic for speakers of Tungusic languages. Trill [r] and flap [ɾ] are free variants of the phoneme /l/, the major variant of which is represented by the lateral approximant [l]. Labiodental [v] is characteristic only for the Russian ethnolect. Labiovelar [w] and bilabial [β] are distributed similar to [q] and [k]: labiovelar [w] appears before /a/ and back vowels, and [β] occurs before front vowels: /da'waj/ ‘let us’, ['βidili] ‘you (we, they) have seen’ (Russian davaj, videli).

     Dental sibilants [s] and [z] appear only in the Russian ethnolect. The major variant for the voiceless fricative is the palato-alveolar [ʃ]. As for the corresponding voiced fricative [ʒ], it is a minor variant of the phoneme /ʤ/, [ʣ] being another variant of the same phoneme. The affricate [ʦ] exists as a minor variant of the palato-alveolar [ʧ].

     The syllable structure is V or CV. Consonant clusters are impossible except for the combination of sonorant (nasal or lateral) + obstruent (plosive or fricative). In these combinations, the consonants may be separated by [ə]: ['mamka], ['maməka] ‘mother’. The complexity of onsets depends on the native language of the speaker. Simple syllable onsets are characteristic for speakers of Chinese, Udihe, and Nanai (and other languages of the Tungusic group). Russian native-speakers may produce more complex onsets, though they also tend to simplify them with respect to the corresponding Russian words. Very few consonants may be found in syllable codas: mainly j and n.

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

Nouns are invariable, e.g. maja - liudi ‘I am human’; dəwa liudi ‘two people’. Natural gender is expressed by different words, e.g. maməka ‘mother’, papa ‘father’; ʒénəs'inə ‘woman’, muʒíkə, musínnə ‘man’. There are no instances of expressing gender of animals.

    Number marking. Depending on the context nouns may refer to singular or plural entities: goda ‘year, years’, lubəli ‘ruble, rubles’, kazəka ‘tale, tales’. In certain variants of Pidgin, the plural marker isio, sio was in the process of grammaticalization. It could occur only with human nouns and probably had the meaning of collective plurality: ribiatisəka isio ‘chidren’; ibəŋka isio ‘the Japanese’. However, even in these variants it is not obligatory. The plural marker never occurs with numerals.

     There is neither a definite nor an indefinite article. Generic noun phrases are not marked.

     There is only one demonstrative which precedes the noun. It is attested in two forms of Russian and Chinese origin eta / chega: chega fanza shipko shango ‘this house is very good’; eta liudi ‘this person, these people’. Chega was characteristic of the variant of Chinese Pidgin Russian spoken in Vladivostok and Manchuria. The demonstrative eta was more widespread; in some varieties of Chinese Pidgin Russian, the demonstrative eta was used so often that it was probably turning into a definiteness marker (see below). There is no difference between adnominal and pronominal demonstratives: Eta was also used as a demonstrative pronoun.

    Possessive constructions: Adnominal possessives precede the noun and have the same form as subject and object pronouns in the core variants, e.g. maja synka ‘my son’; ihiñ domə ‘their house’; ty babəsəkə ‘your grandmother’ (see Table 3). No examples of independent pronominal possessors are found in the existing data. The possessive noun phrase shows the order possessor + possessee; both participants are unmarked:

(1)Eta     bəratə     synə        iwo  gawali-la.

     this    brother  son  3sg  speak-pfv

     ‘The brother’s son talked about it.’ (LJČ)¹

    Numerals are usually of Russian origin, but there are instances of the use of Chinese numerals, iga ‘one’ and lianga ‘two’.

     Adjectives are invariant and precede the noun: xulaoshi duwal ‘good merchandise’, deriani liudi ‘bad person’, kəlasiwə liudi byli [beautiful people were] ‘there were beautiful people’.

     In the core variants of Chinese Pidgin Russian, pronouns have a single form for subject, object, oblique, and possessive, e.g. maja synka ‘my son’; maja laobodaj ‘I work’; húdo néta majá  [bad not.exist me] ‘there is nothing bad at me’.

     The first and second person singular pronouns wo/wody (I) and ni/nidy (you), of Chinese origin, were widespread in the Vladivostok and Manchuria variants; the Chinese “possessive” forms wo-dy [I-poss] and ni-dy [you-poss] were mainly used as subject and object pronouns.

     The forms maja ‘I’ and təwaja ‘you’ (based on the Russian feminine singular possessives moja ‘my’, tvoja ‘your’) are typical for old variants (18th-19th century); mine/tibi (Russian Dative mne/tebe; Genitive menia/tebia) were widespread in the 20th century. Forms coinciding with the Russian subject pronouns ja and ty always coexist with the forms mentioned above. They tend to be used as subject pronouns, but are also attested in the function of adnominal possessives.

Subject pronouns are not obligatory and are often omitted:

them].’ (A)

Special indefinite pronouns exist only for inanimate objects, and are attested only in the object function:

The word for ‘somebody’ is a generic noun: adin liudi (lit. ‘one person’).

6. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

As Chinese Pidgin Russian was always a spoken auxiliary idiom, it never had any stable norm, not even a de facto norm. Therefore the grammatical rules that are given below were often violated.

     Chinese Pidgin Russian has three tense-aspect markers and a zero-marker. All overt markers follow the verb: budu / budi (future marker), la (perfective marker), esa / esi / ju (perfective or evidential marker). Combinations of markers are not possible. The rare occurrences of the forms ju-la and la-ju, which could be interpreted as a combination of ju+la, do not belong to the core structure of the language.

     The zero marker expresses habitual and imperfective (and progressive) aspect in present or past tense; the perfective markers express accomplished events; and the future marker marks future events. In Table 4, the markers are displayed in relation to different aspectual meanings of the verb: dynamic terminative (lamaj ‘break’, pusəkaj ‘let go, put down’); dynamic non-terminative (gawali ‘speak’, pachitaj ‘read’) and stative (səpi ‘sleep’, sidi ‘sit’).

     There are two sets of perfective markers; (1) la / li and (2) esa / esi / ju / byla / jula. Nichols (1996) considers esi/ est’ to be an evidential marker (see the discussion below). There are no varieties of Chinese Pidgin Russian which would have perfective markers of both sets at the same time. Esa/ esi and est’ are purely phonetic variants (< Russian est’ ‘is’). Ju/ jula are of Chinese origin and go back to the Mandarin Chinese verb yǒu ‘exist, have’. Byla is very rare (< Russian byla ‘was (feminine)’). The perfective expresses an accomplished action or a change of state; there are instances of the perfective in the future:

     Chinese Pidgin Russian does not have overtly expressed mood markers. There are two strategies of expressing imperative meaning. It is often expressed by a zero-marked verb with or without a 2nd person or 1st person plural subject pronoun:

(5)    Tibe   sam   pasəmatri!

       2sg    self    look

       ‘Look yourself!’ (A)

Imperative may also be expressed by the modal word nada ‘it is necessary’, the negative form of which forms the prohibitive:

     As Chinese Pidgin Russian simple sentences are often subjectless (because the pronominal subject may be omitted), there is no formal distinction between imperative and indicative forms. Subjunctive, optative, conditional, etc. forms are expressed either by a zero-marked verb or by the combination of the verb with modal words.

     There are two main strategies of verbal negation; each one is typical for a particular variety of Pidgin. Older varieties used the postverbal particle netu/ nitu (< Russian negative existential verb net, netu ‘there is no’); newer ones used the prepositional particle ne/ ni (< Russian verbal negation ne): iwo xadi netu or iwo ne xadi ‘he does not come/go’.

     When combined with other tense-aspectual markers or modal words, only ne was used in all varieties.

     There are three types of modality expressed by different modal words, as presented in Table 5. Modal words may occupy the position before or after the verb, but normally before the tense-aspect markers.

     Evidentiality was probably overtly expressed in the Ussuri variant of Chinese Pidgin Russian spoken by people of Tungusic origin (Nanai, Udihe, Oroch). One of the possible interpretations of the verbal marker esi/est’ is evidential: “…est’ is never used for events which are witnessed, i.e. seen by the speaker and/or hearer. It is used for nonwitnessed events which are asserted on the basis of evidence” (Nichols 1996: 247). This interpretation is supported by the fact that verb forms with the marker esa/esi never co-occur with the negation marker. However, in the Kyahta language, esa/esi obviously has perfective meaning.

     Volition is expressed by the verb xochi/ xochu ‘want, wish’:

     Chinese Pidgin Russian uses no copula with predicative adjectives and predicative noun phrases. With predicative locative phrases, a copula may appear in past time reference (byla) (see 11), but it is still not obligatory (see 9, 10):

(9)    Mishoka  galiazyna.

       sack         dirty

       ‘The sack was/ became dirty’. (Sh)

(11) […]        ixiñ   dimə       desia   byla.

       […]        3pl   house    here    was

        ‘Their house was here.’ (ZK)

Unlike a copula, the existential verbs esi/est/ju’ ‘there is’, byla ‘there was’, netu ‘there is no’ are used very consistently; they are also used in possession constructions, turning into a true possessive verb ‘to have’:

(12) Tibe   ju    piati     kapeka?

       2sg    be   five      kopek

       ‘Do you have five kopeks?’ (Vr)

7. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

Chinese Pidgin Russian tends to have SOV word order (see 13); the next most common word order is OVS, especially with a pronominal subject (see 14).

Clauses with a pronominal subject may lack an overtly expressed subject.

     Chinese Pidgin Russian in its core structure completely lacks both grammatical case and prepositions. Syntactic functions are assigned to the clausal arguments mainly on the basis of the general semantic context and word order:

Agent-Patient:

(15)    Eta    liudi       patom  dzimli    kapadzi.

         this   person  then    ground dig

         ‘Then this person dug the ground.’ (LJČ)

(16)    Heczu    liba   kupi-la.

         Hedzu   fish   buy-pfv

         ‘Hedzu bought fish.’ (Sh)

Location:

(17)    Sam  gorod  pashol jiwo.

         self    city      went    3sg

         ‘As for him, he went to the city.’ (ZK)

Instrument:

(18)    Buldozera  rovno  delaj.

         bulldozer   even    make

         ‘[They] leveled [the ground] with the help of bulldozer.’ (LJČ)

One has to rely on the semantic role of the argument in order to determine its grammatical role in the clause.

     Chinese Pidgin Russian has no category of voice. The semantic role of agent corresponds to the grammatical relation of the subject, and the semantic role of patient corresponds to the grammatical relation of the direct object. The semantic structure of the clause is therefore inferred from the word order.

     With ditransitive verbs, Chinese Pidgin Russian displays the double object construction, though the theme object tends to occupy a position nearer to the verb.

(19) Jevó  dúmaj majá jevó   céna    daváj.

       3sg    think  1sg   3sg    price   give

       ‘He thinks that I give him the (real) price.’ (Ja)

Circumstantial expressions (location, instrument, means of transport, etc.), with the exception of time expressions, tend to occupy the position between S and V:

However, quite frequently the concrete interpretation of the argument structure of the clause is based on the general semantic context.

    Interrogative constructions: Polar interrogative sentences normally do not differ from the corresponding affirmative ones. There was, though, a verb-repetition strategy, borrowed from Chinese (“A-not-A question”):

(21) stára   wéšy    maj    pu       maj?

       old       thing   sell    neg     sell

       ‘Do you sell old stuff?’ (Ja)

     In content questions, the interrogative phrase is moved to the left. The most common question word is kakoj ‘which, what kind, what, how’. Some other question words are constructed on its basis: kakoj  liudi ‘who, whom’ (lit. ‘which person’); kakoj manera ‘how’, ‘of what kind’ (lit. ‘which manner’). At the same time, kada ‘when’ and kuda ‘where, where to’ are also often used.

8. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

Complex sentences are not very characteristic of Chinese Pidgin Russian. Usually utterances consist of sentences of a rather simple structure. In order to make the argument structure more transparent, the whole situation is often split into smaller situations so that each predicate has only one or at most two arguments.

The segmentation of the text into very simple clauses is a characteristic feature of all variants of Chinese Pidgin Russian. The clauses are linked by juxtaposition in the majority of cases. Coordinating conjunctions are never used. Adverbial clauses, however, can be introduced by the conjunctions kada ‘when’, kuda ‘where to’, and ide ‘where’, but they are optional:

(23)    Iwo pomi-la              tamə,   ide       zaxoroni-la  chasa  iwo    kada.

         3sg remember-pfv  there   where bury-pfv      hour    3sg   when

         ‘He remembered the place where she (mother) was buried and the time.’ (LJČ)

9. Lexicon ⇫ ¶

A concordance of all lexical items used in all available sources of Chinese Pidgin Russian clearly shows that there was a lexical core shared by the majority of the sources, and a lexical periphery, often belonging to the speaker’s first language. Only about 100 words turn out to be common for the majority of sources. These are: personal pronouns, deictic words (sichas ‘now, today’, siuda ‘here’, takoj ‘such’), cardinal numerals, quantifiers (noga ‘many’, mala ‘few’, sypka ‘very much’), modal words and verbal markers, verbs (kupi ‘buy’, hodi / hadi ‘go, come’, gawali ‘say’, delaj ‘do, make’, kushaj ‘eat’, pomiraj ‘die’, rabotaj ‘work’, sidi ‘sit’, taskaj ‘drag, carry, steal’, lamaj ‘break’), nouns (liudi ‘person’, dom ‘house’, fanza ‘Chinese house’, miasa ‘meat’, ryba ‘fish’, xəleba ‘bread’, pampusəka ‘Chinese bread’, syna ‘son’, sontsa ‘sun, day’), and three adjectives (xalosi ‘good’, shango ‘good’, sətary ‘old’).

     These lexical items had a rather wide range of meanings, e.g. liudi designated: 1. person; 2. people; 3. animal; 4. any animated creature. Verbs tended to be labile: lamaj could be transitive: ‘break, spoil, chop’, and intransitive ‘be broken, be spoilt, be chopped, be ill’.

     Etymologically, the biggest part of the lexicon goes back to Russian. There were also some words of Mongolian origin (adali ‘as’, ‘like’, shango ‘good’, ‘well’) and loans from languages of local Tungusic minorities (amba ‘evil spirit’, aja ‘good’, ‘well’). A significant number of words go back to Chinese, especially in the variants spoken in Vladivostok and Manchuria (kunia ‘girl’, ‘daughter’, laiba ‘come here’, juli ‘to row’, ‘boat’ and others). There were numerous Russian/Chinese doublets in the varieties mentioned: personal pronouns (maja/ wody; tibi/ nidy), demonstratives (eta/ chega), verbal negation (ne, netu/ bu, pu), and the perfective form of the existential verb (byla/ ju la). The origin of some rather widespread words is unknown: karapchi ‘steal’, sypko ‘very much’.