Yokohama Pidgin Japanese, Yokohamese or Japanese Ports Lingo was a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

-based pre-

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 in the

Yokohama is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of To ...

region during the late 19th century for communication between Japanese and foreigners, mainly

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

speaking westerners and

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

traders. Documentation of Yokohama Pidgin Japanese shows that it was not a stable pidgin, as it often varied between individual speakers, often dependent on the first language of the speaker. Andrei Avaram, a linguist from the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest ( ro, Universitatea din București), commonly known after its abbreviation UB in Romania, is a public university founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princel ...

, referred to Yokohama Pidgin Japanese and Japanese Pidgin English as "Two sides of the same coin," due to both of them being contact languages used by traders, with little dominance between the contributing languages. Most of the first-hand information on the pidgin comes from ''"''Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect," a humorous booklet published in 1879 by Hoffman Atkinson.

References

* * Japanese-based pidgins and creoles Languages of Japan Extinct languages of Asia Languages extinct in the 19th century {{ja-lang-stub