Chinese Pidgin English
type of contact language
Chinese Pidgin English (Cantonese: 廣東番話) (also called Chinese Coastal English, Pigeon English, or China Coast Pidgin) was a pidgin language lexically based on English, but influenced by a Chinese substratum. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, there was also Chinese Pidgin English spoken in Cantonese-speaking portions of China. Chinese Pidgin English is heavily influenced by a number of varieties of Chinese with variants arising among different provinces (for example in Shanghai and Ningbo).
History
The English language first arrived in China in the 1630s, when English traders arrived in South China. Chinese Pidgin English was spoken first in the areas of Macao and Guangzhou (City of Canton), later spreading north to Shanghai by the 1830s. "Yangjing Bang English" (Chinese: 洋涇浜英語; pinyin: Yáng jīng bāng yīngyǔ) derives from the name of a former creek in Shanghai near the Bund where local workers communicated with English-speaking foreigners in pidgin (broken English); Yangjing Bang has since been filled in and is now the eastern part of Yan'an Road, the main east–west artery of central Shanghai.
Historically, it was a modified form of English developed in the 17th century for use as a trade language or lingua franca between the English and the Chinese. Chinese Pidgin started in Guangzhou, China, after the English established their first trading port there in 1699. Pidgin English is a mutual linguistic project developed between Chinese and foreign traders. Specifically, it arose under the sociopolitical circumstances where the Qing empire only allowed limited contact between foreign English trade agents and Chinese "Hong" guild traders.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chinese Pidgin English” is type of contact language. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chinese, Pidgin and English, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “type of contact language” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3435078. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1699.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chinese Pidgin English” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.