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Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 38:2 (2023) ► pp.320–388

A new view on ‘Yilan Creole’

ORCID logo | Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica
In multilingual Taiwan, a language variety spoken in I-Lan County of northeastern Taiwan has been dubbed ‘Yilan Creole’ and analyzed as a creole by scholars because it contains features from Japanese and Austronesian languages. This article revisits the question of whether it is indeed a creole. I scrutinize its sociohistorical background as well as aspects of its lexicon and grammar, which I compare with those of Japanese and (Squliq) Atayal to provide a solid foundation for assessing its creole status. I conclude that ‘Yilan Creole’ is by no means a creole.
Keywords: Vernacular Atayalic Japanese, Yilan Creole, Atayal, Japanese, Han-hsi
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review: Contact languages
  • 3.Sociohistorical background of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese
  • 4.Basic vocabulary of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese
  • 5.Phonological comparison of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese, Atayal, and Japanese
    • 5.1A phonological overview of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese
    • 5.2Interim remarks on the phonology of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese
  • 6.Morphosyntactic comparison of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese, Atayal, and Japanese
    • 6.1The case-marking system of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese
      • 6.1.1Subject and object marking
      • 6.1.2 The many uses of dative -ni
      • 6.1.3Passives and causatives
      • 6.1.4Other common markers
      • 6.1.5Interim remarks on case-marking
    • 6.2The tense, aspect, and mood system of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese
      • 6.2.1Interim remarks on the tense, aspect, and mood system
  • 7.The creolehood of Vernacular Atayalic Japanese revisited
    • 7.1The traditional and mainstream view
    • 7.2The universalist view
    • 7.3Assumed relexification
    • 7.4The founder principle
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 21 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00115.tan
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