Tây Bồi ( vi, tiếng Tây Bồi), or Vietnamese Pidgin French, was a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

spoken by non-French-educated

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

, typically those who worked as servants in French households or

milieu The social environment, social context, sociocultural context or milieu refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educate ...

x during the colonial era. Literally, it means "French (Tây) f- or spoken bymale servants (Bồi)". During the French colonization period, the majority of household servants for the French were male. The term is used by Vietnamese themselves to indicate that the spoken

French language French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...

is poor, incorrect and ungrammatical. is the Vietnamese phonetic spelling of the French word "boy" (from the English word), which refers to male household servants (it also means "to add" as a verb, which incidentally refers to how this pidgin worked). The French government/colonizers or protectors opened French public schools (from pre-kindergarten through the Baccalaureat II) staffed by all native French speakers to take care of their compatriots/expatriates' children's education. Vietnamese children were admitted as well if they could pass the entrance examination tailored to their age and grade level. The Vietnamese elite class spoke French, and those with French Baccalaureat diplomas could attend French universities in France and in its colonies. After France's withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, Tây Bồi ceased to be used as a common language as standard French was used and is believed to have become extinct around the 1980s. Today standard French continues to be taught at schools and universities in Vietnam as a second language.

Examples

(Bickerton 1995: 163

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tay Boi French-based pidgins and creoles Languages of Vietnam Extinct languages of Asia Languages extinct in the 1980s French language in Asia

Examples

See also

References