Chinese Fort Creolization: on the Origin of Xining Mandarin

Abstract

Xining Mandarin (Qinghai province, Northwest China) strikingly diverges from the usual syntactic profile of Sinitic languages, featuring an array of head-final categories which are inherent instead to the local substrate languages. In this paper, the formation of the dialect is considered from a historical perspective and it is seen to have emerged in a fort creolization (Bickerton, 1988) scenario, comparable to that found for European lexifier creoles along the West African coast. Linguistically relevant aspects of the socio-historical scenario underlying the dialect are reconstructed and Xining Mandarin is argued to have formed as the language of Ming dynasty Chinese colonists was acquired imperfectly due to poor access to Chinese among the local population. The speed of creolization and the role of language shift is evaluated, and it is argued that Ming creolization was gradual (rather than abrupt), reflecting cases of fort creolization elsewhere in the world.