What is it about?
A Japanese-based creole language is spoken by Atayal and Seediq (also written Sediq) people living in four villages of Yilan County, Taiwan. Japanese is the superstrate (lexifier) language; Atayal is the substrate language. This short note discusses the sociohistorical background and the structural characteristics of the language to establish that it is indeed a creole, and suggests that the language be named “Yilan Creole.”
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Why is it important?
Yilan Creole has been used for more than half a century, but no investigation of it was carried out until Sanada and Chien (2007; in Japanese). This short note is the first publication in English on this Japanese-based creole. The paper discusses (a) its distribution, names, and speakers; (b) its current status in terms of usage; (c) the sociohistorical background of the formation of this creole language; (d) some linguistic characteristics of the language.
Perspectives
The authors have been researching language contact between Japanese and Taiwan’s local languages since the late 1990s. In the process of investigating the Japanese variety once used as a lingua franca in Taiwan, the authors discovered the existence of this new language, Yilan Creole, which is a result of language contact between Japanese and Atayal and Seediq. We are continuing to study Yilan Creole, and have also published work describing the language’s structure and processes of change by examining the usage of basic vocabulary, case marking, personal pronouns, demonstratives, numerals, and negatives. Yilan Creole is the only known Japanese-lexicon creole in the world. For this reason alone, it is interesting and important to clarify the similarities and differences between Yilan Creole and the other creoles in the world.
Yuehchen Chien
National Dong Hwa University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Yilan Creole in Taiwan, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, August 2010, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jpcl.25.2.11yue.
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