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Part of
Advances in Contact Linguistics: In honour of Pieter Muysken
Edited by Norval Smith, Tonjes Veenstra and Enoch O. Aboh
[Contact Language Library 57] 2020
► pp. 261–282

Mixing and semantic transparency in the genesis of Yilan Japanese

ORCID logo | University of Queensland

In this short piece, the so-called ‘Yilan Creole’ spoken in Yilan County, Taiwan (Republic of China) is reanalysed in light of contemporary discussions on mixing and the transparency principle as factors behind the genesis of languages. I argue that there is evidence to conceive the emergence of this vernacular as a case of Atayal+Japanese language mixing (rather than creolisation), whereby a large amount of lexicon, e.g. nouns, verbs, and particles, have been retained maintaining not only their original phonological form, but operating in the original Atayal way, within an all-encompassing Japanese grammar skeleton. In addition, a discussion on the transparency principle as a key factor in the genesis of this mixed language is brought into focus.

Keywords: mixed language, semantic transparency, Yilan Creole, Japanese, Atayal, Formosan languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Yilan “creole” of Taiwan
  • 3.Is Yilan Creole a creole?
    • 3.1Creole-like grammatical structures in Yilan Creole
  • 4.Yilan Japanese as a mixed language
  • 5.Semantic transparency in Yilan Japanese
    • 5.1Uniformity
    • 5.2Universality
    • 5.3Simplicity
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of conventions (following the Leipzig glossing rules)
  • References
Published online: 29 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.57.09roj
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