Speaking with Devils: Sino-European Vernaculars and Translingual Communication before the Treaty Ports

Abstract

This article examines the dynamics of Chinese–Western translingual contact in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular attention to the problem of oral communication between native speakers of Sinitic and European languages. Despite a robust body of scholarship on the economic and political dimensions of Chinese and Euro-American interaction in the decades preceding the First Opium War, the routine linguistic practices and adaptations that mediated everyday commercial and social exchanges remain only superficially understood. Critical to such exchanges was the development, circulation, and adoption of Chinese pidgins (trade languages) as vernacular instruments for negotiating not just business matters but a range of grassroots interactions and relationships that developed out of the South China coast’s position as a nexus for global interchange. A deeper understanding of these linguistic dynamics provides new insights into the interwoven histories of trade, migration, and translingual enterprise and offers a more nuanced picture of Sino-Western relations before the First Opium War.