#pidgin language

Ok so I just made a different post about this but I need to elaborate: The Elden Ring messaging system is legitimately such an interesting microcosm about how language is used as a tool and shaped to suit the needs it's being used for. I could actually make an entire study about how this can be used to better understand the formation of pidgin languages in the same way that epidemiologists studied the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft to better understand the mechanics of how disease affects human behavior. Video games as an academic lens into peoples' minds has always been a fascinating topic to me, and by the end of this, you'll see why.

First off, message.

So for those not indoctrinated into the series/game, Elden Ring is a big open world game made by From Software, which won game of the year 2022 among some other awards (if you've played it or know anything about it, just skip to the next header). Each player plays as a Tarnished and explores this massive environment called The Lands Between individually, but if another player is walking in the same area that you are, you can see their "ghost" moving through the world, and you can "invade" or "be summoned" into another player's iteration of the world in order to briefly interact with it before returning to your own iteration. This occupies a weird space in between singleplayer and multiplayer, with these heavily limited and kind of random methods of interaction between players, but that's not the most interesting way of communicating with your fellow Tarnished; that title goes to the messages system. You can write a message onto a small stone, and leave it on the ground, and then that little stone with the message on it will have a random chance to appear in any player's iteration of the world for them to read. This is a tradition which has been going in From Software's games long since before the inception of Elden Ring, although I'm mostly going to be focusing on the message system of that title, because documenting the history of the 13+ years running Soulsbourne franchise is way too much, even for a nerd like me. The point is that messages are a lot more likely to be seen than any other method of player-to-player interaction, and you can even leave little "gestures" to go with them, where the reader can see your character striking a pose while they read the message. What a neat little mechanic, which definitely doesn't have any hidden layers of depth, and certainly wouldn't spawn an entire emergent system of pseudolinguistics, right?

No message ahead, be wary of mimicry

Well, when I said that messages are written by other players, that was a lie. To make a message, you don't type it out with your keyboard, you select what you want to say, from a big list of preset phrases. It works that way for a lot of reasons, foremost of all as a profanity filter, but also to prevent too many spoilers and maintain atmosphere. The sets of phrases are incredibly limiting, famously requiring players to use weird fake old-english diction in order to express a simple thought (Strong foe ahead, be weary of death. Look carefully ahead, visions of item. Suffering, o suffering, why is it always bad luck? etc). This seems like a limitation which would put a serious damper on anyone trying to actually communicate their thoughts, but gamers are a persistent sort, and have a lot of trouble taking no for an answer. They also have way too much time on their hands, and like to solve puzzles, a terrifying combination of traits, and the perfect one to accidentally create a conlang. With the unexpectedly massive audience that this game picked up on launch, millions of people left messages desperately trying to get something across, and if the game's preset vocabulary didn't contain the phrases to express it, they would forge their own path. Any big fans of linguistic history can already tell the direction that this might be going, as we move on into the next chapter:

Teacher, Liar, Lovable Sort

When the game released, there was chaos. The Lands Between are fraught with hidden passages, deception, and blatant bullshit, and the first kind of players leaving messages tried to helpfully communicate what you could trust, and what you couldn't. This is what the message system was intended for after all, giving advice to your peers, and what many people still use it for today. The second kind of players tried to do the opposite, deliberately leading people to their doom, just because they could. The third, and most numerous sort, were simply awestruck at everything the game had to offer, and left a series of remarks on the beauty and humor of the world. The messages left by each group are pretty easy to differentiate to the trained eye, which is the main feature causing me to point out this division of players. Let's call these groups the teachers, the liars, and the lovable sorts. A teacher can be recognized if their messages suggest something within reason, and being backed up by the peer-review of nearby messages to the same effect. If three messages are all sitting on the ground next to eachother, each saying something along the lines of "seek up, look carefully ahead", then a local collage of teachers are trying to let you know about a secret path ahead leading you up towards a hidden objective. However, a single message next to a bloodstained cliff-edge stating "jumping required ahead" is almost certainly a liar, trying to deceive an unsuspecting player into making a dubious leap. Liars sometimes use slightly simpler grammar than teachers do, being less committed to getting their point across. Wait a minute, linguistic variance based on intent? No no, this is just a video game about fighting monsters, surely such an interesting emergent system wouldn't arise from something like that. Lastly, the lovable sorts have the most ranging grammar, spanning from a simple word such as "dog" (a word used colloquially to describe all creatures, from turtles to dragons), to complex sentences requiring the combination of many phrases. However, a lovable sort can be differentiated by the fact that they merely remark upon the world as it is, instead of trying to offer advice to other players, as a teacher or liar might. Some of their most iconic phrases are "Elden ring ahead", used to sarcastically denote a dead end where a player might have been expecting treasure, "you don't have the right, o, you don't have the right" which indicates a locked door, or the world-famous "try finger, but hole", a phrase which explains itself. The most incredible thing about the words of the lovable sort, is that they all require a little bit of thinking to understand their actual meaning, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes like a second language to you! Wait a minute, a second language?

Message? Wasn't expecting introspection

As time went on, the three main groups of message-writers still kept chugging along, creating new works of writing every day, but advancements in understanding of the game's inner workings allowed these messages to become more and more complex. Compound words started to be formed to represent concepts outside of the preset vocabulary, like "skeleton, house" for coffin, "dung, key" to describe the donkeys accompanying traveling merchants, and "edge, lord" being used to refer to the NPC Ensha, a man wearing flamboyant armor made out of bones who takes himself way too seriously. It's worth noting in this section that for a specific period of time, The Lands Between were overtaken by a horde of messages stating only the words "fort, night". Despite the crude and humorous nature of the entire thing, it was clear to see that the linguistic patterns of the Elden Ring community were evolving into their own beast, far beyond the usages that the developers had intended. Words had shed their original meaning, to instead take up contextual meanings based on how players used them, effectively becoming different words entirely. Depending on how you define this, it's either a microcosm of incredibly fast and severe linguistic drift, or the emergence of a new pidgin or conlang entirely. If you really stretch things, you could almost call the message system of Elden Ring an entirely new language in and of itself.

Well done, victory ahead!

Just had to share this turn of phrase with the rest of the linguistics tumblr.

So the whole purpose is to kind of see how people's worldviews are different based on how they phonetically spit out a new word. like, oh, you would say "tree" as (xxxxxx)? i personally think it would be (yyyyyyyy.)or something. and if someone comes up with the same word for two different concepts-- why? how do culture, personal preferences, and more play a role?

i'm not working on a thesis or anything, it's just a good opportunity to psychoanalyze random strangers i guess.

also: the language viossa gave me this idea.

Psalm 23 For Pidgin Language:

Baba God na my Shepherd, I no go Lack anything.

E make me tanda for where everything good, E carry me walka for where gbege nor too dey.

E make my soul coolele, E carry me walka for where I go dey do wetin go make am Happy, because say na him be Bros J.

Even if I walka for where katakata, bad belle and Satan pikin boku, I no fit fear dem, because Bros J tanda for my…

Attention: This article contains Chinese and Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters, Japanese kanji and kana.

  Talking about pidgin languages, we might all have some typical examples in our mind, from a stereotypical pidgin like Chinese Pidgin English, to some highly creolised languages, such as Tok Pisin. In case you haven’t an idea about what a pidgin language is, it is usually charactarised as being a simplified but conventionalised language without any native speakers. Although they may differ in some aspects of grammar, they share the basic process by which they emerge and develop: in simple terms, they come from constant language contact, and a major purpose is to construct a lingua franca among people speaking different mother tongues. Most of the time, this process is quite “peaceful” – the word “pidgin” itself, which is the (mis)pronunciation of English word “business”, has already provided some evidence: these languages often originated from a series of commercial activities between different countries.

But in the world of pidgin languages, a peaceful development is not always the case. Not only commercial activities can lead to different languages coming into contact, and the birth of a new pidgin language, but also invasion and wars. In the dust of history, we can trace some dead pidgins to their dirty background, and by studying these languages, we can reveal some fragments of the past. In this post, I would like to introduce a pidgin “Manchurian Chinese-Japanese Pidgin”, which is dead nowadays but was alive and well during the Manchukuo era (1932-1945) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Born in the war, this language has a complicated history of language policies and negative evaluation, but it’s worth closer investigation.

  A brief history of Sino-Japanese language contact

Although historically the Japanese language has received a series of influences from archaic Chinese, I would like to skip that part and only focus on the situation of modern Japan, i.e. after Meiji Restoration (1868). Since China was one of the biggest military targets of Japan at that time, Chinese was an important part in the training of the military forces. When the Imperial Japanese Army Academy was founded in 1881, Chinese was already one of the well-established courses; specialised textbooks were published during the First Sino-Japanese War to help Japanese soldiers to fight and communicate in China (Ando, 1988).

Right after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japanese started its influence in the north-eastern China: while the South Manchurian Railway was being built, a large group of Japanese soldiers settled down along the railway, and their language started to mix with the local Chinese dialect. This mixed language, also known as a pidgin, is called “Railway Mandarin” (沿線官話) in Standard Chinese; it is the embryo of Manchurian Chinese-Japanese Pidgin.

The establishment of Manchukuo in 1932 was a signal that Japan had started its colonial action in China; the Manchurian government took over the north-eastern part of China and Japanese immigrants rushed in. After the establishment of Manchukuo, language contact between Chinese and Japanese became more frequent, and some policies regarding the use of languages were issued by the Japanese government. Chinese residents in Manchukuo and other Japanese-occupied areas were forced to study Japanese in school, and top-performing students could go to Japan for higher education (Kawashima, 2006). At the same time, the Japanese military continued its invasion into other parts of China, and they needed to learn Chinese in order to command the local Chinese people.

A complicated grammar of Manchurian Chinese-Japanese Pidgin

The Chinese-Japanese pidgin language developed in the Manchukuo era and Second Sino-Japanese War has a number of names, because it is referred to in different historical and linguistic texts. Here I partly follow the suggestion of Sakurai (2012, “Manchurian Pidgin Chinese”), and adopt a neutral name “Manchurian Chinese-Japanese Pidgin” (MCJP), because that name clearly shows the main features of that language: it is a pidgin language of Chinese and Japanese; it clearly shows features of both Chinese and Japanese; the language has not been creolised; and, its “hometown” was Manchukuo. Some other names are also used in historical records: the name accepted by most Chinese scholars is Xiehe Yu (協和語, pronounced as Kyowa-go in Japanese, literally “Concord Language”; see Sakurai 2012 for a review), while Ando (1988) refers to one particular MCJP variant as Military Chinese Language (兵隊シナ語, sometimes 兵隊中国語).

MCJP is marked by its complex origins, numerous variants and complicated structures. As I explained in the previous section, both Japanese native speakers and Chinese native speakers needed to use a pidgin language to communicate; however, due to the distinct patterns of language exposure, they ended up constructing several variants of pidgin language. We could then divide this pidgin to two main branches: one of them uses Chinese as its target language (hence MCJP-Chinese), and the other uses Japanese instead (hence MCJP-Japanese). According to historical documents, these two variants stabilised in early 1940s and were widely used in the communication between Japanese soldiers and Chinese people (Ando, 1988; Sakurai, 2012). Thus, they are not simply the product of language learning and foreigner-talk. Due to the similar function and status they have in the language environment of Manchukuo, in recent research they tend to be treated as different variants of a single pidgin (Sakurai, 2012; Zhang, 2012), even though at first glance they look pretty different from each other.

Young people who grow up in China may still remember some remarkable scenes in TV programmes about the Second Sino-Japanese war: usually, there is a commander dressed in the yellow-green Japanese military uniform, with a little round moustache, shouting to the hero or heroine who is fighting against the Japanese, “你的, 良心, 大大的坏了” (“you, the conscience went bad badly” which is a weird variant of “你没有良心” – “you don’t have conscience”). Such strings are easily recognisable by Chinese people who have little knowledge of Japanese, but they do not sound like “authentic Chinese sentences” to the native speakers – you seldom hear a Chinese native speaker put her main verb at the end of a sentence without any auxiliary verb like ba or bei, unless she intends to achieve certain rhetorical effects. Those lines are vivid examples of MCJP-Chinese, which is often used by Japanese soldiers; in Ando’s (1988) analysis it is called Military Chinese Language.

Chart 1: The syntax structures of MCJP-Chinese and Standard Chinese.

MCJP 你 的 良心 大大的 坏 了 You Topic-marker conscience badly go bad PAR Topic (subject) (Object) Main verb Chinese 你 没有 良心 You have no conscience Subject Main verb object

    From the comparison above, we can see that the sentence structure of MCJP-Chinese mainly follows Japanese; it has an SOV word order, and the particle “的” becomes a part of the topic, which is similar to a topic-marker (Zhang, 2012; while Chinese does not have any pronounced topic-marker). Practically, however, the target language of MCJP-Chinese is Chinese; the main vocabulary and the pronunciation of words are rough replication of Chinese words and sounds, which is shown in Chart 2.

Chart 2: The pronunciation of MCJP based on Chinese and Standard Chinese (example from Ando, 1988)

MCJP expressions ニーデ カンホージ プシン テンホー ファイラ Pronunciation /ni:.de/ /kan.ho:.ʥi/ /pɯ.ɕing/ /teŋ.ho:/ /ɸɯai.ɾa/ Corresponding Chinese expressions 你的 干活计 不行 顶好 坏了 Pronunciation /ni.tə/ /kan.xuɔ.ʨi/ /pu.ɕing/ /tiŋ.xao/ /xuai.lə/ Meaning you or your labour, work not good excellent go bad

The other variant of MCJP, whose target language is Japanese, was used by the Chinese native speakers in the Japanese-occupied area, especially in Manchukuo. Those Chinese people were forced to learn Japanese in school, but the level of language education varies place to place, and Chinese language was still the dominant language in their daily communication with other Chinese people; such situation led to the development of a “new type” of Japanese, which includes code-mixing and some special grammar. It was once regarded as a “low-level” Japanese variant by the Japanese native speakers, but recent studies show that it is in fact a pidgin that has been ignored (Zhang, 2012).

One prominent characteristic of MCJP-Japanese is the use of the auxiliary verb aru (Hiragana ある; Katakana アル); in Japanese, aru should only be used after transitive verbs and to indicate the meaning of state modification, but in MCJP-Japanese, it replaced other auxiliary verbs and lost its original meaning. Interestingly, not only Chinese people in the Japanese-occupied area, but also Japanese soldiers whose mother tongue is Japanese adopted this structure in the conversation to Chinese people: The local Chinese: 二十銭安いあるか？(“Is twenty cents cheap enough?” Standard Japanese: 二十銭安いですか？) The Japanese soldier: うわ！高いあるな！(“Oh! Too expensive!” Standard Japanese: うわ！高いですな！) (Example from Zhang, 2012)

As well as this extension of aru, a number of particles in Standard Japanese are dropped in MCJP-Japanese, especially the case-markers like “が” (ga, nominative marker), “を” (wo, accusative marker) and even “の” (no, possessive marker) (Zhang, 2012).

Although we can generally divide MCJP into two different variants, there is no clear boundary between them. In the actual language material, we can discover that a speaker can switch between two variants of MCJP and even mix them up in one sentence, no matter what his native language is. From the perspective of sociolinguistics, MCJP is one lingua franca used in the Manchukuo and other Japanese-occupied areas in China during the Second Sino-Japanese war.

Nowadays, even though MCJP disappeared several decades ago, its influences are still obvious. In some fictional works based on the history of that war by Chinese and Japanese authors, we can discover a trace of MCJP, for example, the use of aru of MCJP-Japanese has become a (wrong) stereotype in Japanese comics to show that a Chinese character is speaking Japanese, while the iconic line “你的, 良心, 大大的坏了” of MCJP-Chinese is also a stereotype of Japanese learning Chinese language.

Although the war was a terrible event, the language that it bore is precious to linguists in China and Japan, because it opens a door to understanding the development of a pidgin language.

  References (I am terribly sorry that all of them are in Japanese; there is no reliable English resource about this language, which is a great pity):

Ando, H. (1988). Chinese and Modern Japan (中国語と近代日本). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Kawashima, S. (2006). War-time system and Japanese language – Japanese research (戰時體制與日本語·日本研究). Proceeding in International Symposium of Transformation of Modern Japanese Society, Taiwan: Academia Sinica.

Sakurai, T. (2012). Manchuria Pidgin Chinese and Kyowa-go (満州ピジン中国語と協和語). Meikai Japanese 17:2. Retrieved from http://www.urayasu.meikai.ac.jp/japanese/meikainihongo/17/sakurai.pdf

Zhang, S. (2012). The language contact in Manchukuo: Realities of language contact shown in new materials (「満洲国」における言語接触－新資料に見られる言語接触の実態).  Retrieved from https://glim-re.glim.gakushuin.ac.jp/bitstream/10959/2750/1/jinbun_10_51_68.pdf