A new view on ‘Yilan Creole’

Abstract

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.