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Pidgin and Creole Studies represent a well-established field in linguistics. In the African context, however, the study of pidgins and creoles is still much less advanced. African pidgin and creole (PC) languages fulfill vehicular functions, whereas not all lingua francas in Africa are to be regarded as pidgins and creoles. While a map shows the distribution of African PC languages arranged from North and West to Central, East and southern Africa, they are further grouped and characterized in the text according to their main lexifier languages, by their presumed origins, the major contact languages involved and—if known—the actual linguistic outcome(s) of these respective contact situations.

The origin of the term ‘lingua franca’ is unclear. According to Ostler (2010, p. 7), lingua franca “seems to be a retranslation of some Eastern-Mediterranean term for ‘language of the Franks’”. Ostler also notes (2010, p. 4) the “original ‘Lingua Franca’ was once a particular language … the common contact language of the Eastern-Mediterranean in the first half of the second millennium, the pidgin Italian in which Greeks and Turks could talk to Frenchmen and Italians”. He defines a lingua franca as a “contact language used for communication among people who do not share a mother tongue” (2010, p. 36). Seidlhofer points out that the term has Latin roots meaning something like ‘free language’. “It is thus not fanciful to think of ‘Lingua Franca’ as ‘free language’ … a means of intercultural communication not particular to countries and ethnicities, a linguistic resource that is not contained in, or constrained by traditional (and notoriously tendentious) ideas of what constitutes a ‘language’” (2011, p. 81).

As a creolized variety of Melanesian Pidgin English spoken in Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin has a simplified grammar and a reduced lexicon. In spite of it, the conceptual processes that it employs are as varied and complex as in English—its lexifier and one of the major Western languages. Section 1 briefly introduces the symbolic nature of language. Section 2 describes the basic properties of pidgin and creole languages. Section 3 provides an overview of the insofar analyses of figurative patterns in contact languages. Section 4 presents in detail the methodological framework of the analysis, which is based on the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff in Metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 202–251, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson in Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980), theory of conceptual metonymy (Radden & Kovecses in Metonymy in language and thought. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 17–59, 1999), and forms of metaphor-metonymy interaction jointly called ‘metaphtonymy’ (Goossens in Cognitive Linguistics 1(3), pp. 323–340, 1990). Sections 5, 6, and 7 discuss numerous examples of Tok Pisin expressions based on the above-mentioned patterns of conceptual construal. Section 8 summarizes the results of the analysis.

English was transplanted to Africa in three different ways. First, through trade contacts along the African West coast, which occurred from the fifteenth century onward, giving rise to pidgin Englishes in West Africa. Second, native varieties in Africa are spoken by descendants of British settlers and others who shifted to English as their native language. The largest settler population is to be found in South Africa where settlement started in the early nineteenth century, alongside Zimbabwe and Kenya. Resettled slaves in Liberia and Sierra Leone developed their own varieties, giving rise in Sierra Leone to Krio, a creole variety that influenced the preexisting pidgin varieties in West Africa. Third, exploitation colonization from the late nineteenth century led to the development of non-native, indigenized varieties of English. Initially, only a small local elite gained access to high proficiency in mission schools but, after independence from the mid-twentieth century, a massive expansion of the national school education granted access to English-language education for a larger part of the indigenous population, albeit with less proficient teachers providing the input, resulting in lower levels of attainment than among the local elites.

International audience; The development of HLT tools inevitably involves the need for language resources. However, only a handful number of languages possesses such resources. This paper presents the development of HLT tools for the African language Naija (Nigerian Pidgin), spoken in Nigeria. Particularly, this paper is focusing on developing language resources for a tokenizer, an automatic speech system for predicting the pronunciation of the words and their segmentation.

In the 21st century, the year of technology, Internet and traveling, different contacts between languages are very common. That is why such phenomena as pidgin (hinglish in our case) becomes very important. This pidgin is used by many Indian and English people all over the world on the daily baisis. This article is about grammatical and features of one of such languages, it is about hinglish. The data for the research was the book “the White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga and “Stay hungry or stay foolish” by Rashmi Bansal of 2008 year. В XXI веке, веке технологий, Интернета и путешествий, различные контакты между языками случаются очень часто. Поэтому такое явление, как пиджин (хинглиш в нашем случае) — очень важное явление. Данным пиджином пользуются множество индийцев и англичан по всему миру ежедневно. У него множество особенностей. В этой статье речь пойдет о грамматических особенностях данного пиджина. Материалами для исследования послужили книги Аравинд Адиги «Белый Тигр» и Рашми Банзаля «Оставайся голодным или оставайся глупым».

This paper is a corpus-based study of the various forms and uses of clefts in Naija, the largest West-African English lexifier pidgincreole, spoken in Nigeria and its diaspora as a second language by close to 100 million speakers. The data on which this paper is based is taken from the 500,000 word ANR-NaijaSynCor corpus, consisting of 300 samples of spontaneous speech, recorded in 2017 in 13 different locations in Nigeria, from 330 different speakers of both sexes, of various ages, education levels, and geographic origins. The quantitative data is taken from a sub-section of 9,621 sentences (almost 150,000 tokens) that constitute a syntactic treebank mirroring the social and geographic sampling of the full corpus. Clefts, pseudo-clefts and reverse pseudo- clefts are examined. Four types of clefts are described: wey-clefts, bare clefts, double clefts and zero-copula clefts. The properties of those clefting patterns are represented using a UD-type annotation scheme named SUD for Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies. The quantitative analysis of the data and comparison with former descriptions of the language underline the massive domination of bare clefts, and the emergence, among these various patterns, of a relative pronoun nãĩ “who/which” used only with cleft constructions, while the relativiser wey is being abandoned and specialises as relative clause operator.

The development of writing was a milestone achievement in the history of humanity separating it from prehistory. However, some languages (like Polish Sign Language) still do not possess a written variant. Deaf Poles “talk” in Polish Sign Language but write in Polish. This article is an analysis of the effects Polish Sign Language has on the way Deaf Poles write in Polish based on a corpus of comments from a website dedicated to the Deaf. The article compares its results with those of Aleksandra Świecka who carried out a similar study in 2017. The analysis of the results sheds a different light on a claim that Deaf Poles write using “broken Polish.” The writing of the Polish Deaf might be neither written Polish nor written Polish Sign Language but something in the likes of a pidgin (Tomaszewski and Rosik in Czlowiek wobec ograniczen. Niepelnosprawnośc – Komunikacja – Terapia. Fundacja ORATOR, Lublin, pp. 133–165, 2002) or an interlanguage (Żurek in 40 lat wroclawskiej glottodydaktyki polonistycznej. Teoria i praktyka. Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT, Wroclaw, pp. 291–301, 2014).

In this paper, I propose that the Arabic-based migrant pidgin Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) is shaped by the initial work environment of its speakers. My data consist of recordings of conversations with 16 GPA speakers living in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, who have learned the language working either as shopkeepers or as maids in private homes. By looking at the use of verb forms, I find that the maids use significantly more verbs derived from imperatives than the shopkeepers, and argue that this is the result of the social context in which they work. I then compare the speech of the maids to the speakers of Pidgin Madam (PM) in Lebanon, who work in a similar environment, and show that while these two varieties share the preponderance of imperative verbs, the feminine-derived forms which make up most of the verbal inventory of PM are comparatively rare in maids’ GPA. I attribute this to the existence of similar yet distinct foreigner talk norms in the Gulf and in Lebanon, each of them reflecting the composition of the migrant population in their respective regions.

Published literature on Lingua Franca contains divergent views regarding its place in the taxonomy of contact language types. While this language is traditionally regarded as a pidgin, some scholars consider it more accurate to view it as a koine. This paper shows that Lingua Franca exhibits features that are consistent with both pidginization and koineization, and proposes to view it as located on the pidgin/koine continuum.

Humour, an established means of releasing stress and tension has attracted scholarly attention over the years. In the Nigerian discourse context, studies on Crisis-Motivated Humour (CMH) via CMC platforms are scanty. This paper investigates humour shared through the social media which reflects the socioeconomic/political challenges in Nigeria in order to identify CMH as a form of humour through which real-life experiences of other people can be understood. Ethnography of Communication and Pragmatic act theory serve as the theoretical framework. Ten anonymous humorous compositions were randomly selected from WhatsApp and Facebook. CMH is a creative composition of jokes which reflects the Nigerians’ experiences, perceptions, imaginations and assumptions. They are purposefully composed by Nigerians, in order to downplay the effects of the crisis and bring temporary reliefs to the audience. These jokes elicit amusement, high-level wits and satirise the crisis situation(s). CMH are composed mainly in English with a blend of pidgin and a reflection of some Nigerianism. They are replete with verifiable, but exaggerated facts deployed through varying practs. Use of the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ and second person singular/plural ‘you’ with the use of simple present tense of verb among other grammatical elements, are a norm. All these make some of the jokes believable and also establish CMH as a unique genre of humour with an unlimited audience. CMH are often preserve-able and re-usable and thus serve as a relevant medium through which political leaders can assess the plights of the populace and access first-hand information on the ‘real’ impacts of the crisis.

The question of how many language families there are in the world is addressed here. The reasons for why it has been so difficult to answer this question are explored. The answer arrived at here is 406 independent language families (including language isolates); however, this number is relative, and factors that prevent us from arriving at a definitive number for the world’s language families are discussed. A full list of the generally accepted language families is presented, which eliminates from consideration unclassified (unclassifiable) languages, pidgin and creole languages, sign languages, languages of undeciphered writing systems, among other things. A number of theoretical and methodological issues fundamental to historical linguistics are discussed that have impacted interpretations both of how language families are established and of particular languages families, both of which have implications for the ultimate number of language families.

This research is aimed to describe the jargonitis created by PT Danone as the company producing “Aqua.” Then, the analysis was based on the cohesion and coherences provided on the label of “Aqua.” The jargonitis was created by the company to attract the market target, in this case the teenagers as the largest consumers in the world. In a business world, there are some efforts conducted by a company for the products released can be effective for some people, inthis case, to attract some people. The effective method to conduct the efforts is by marketing. One of the methods done by a mineral water company is by creating jargonitis. Therefore, some people will remember the jargon with the purpose of the company that “someone could not focus if the were dehydrated.” The study used content analysisi method. As the results of the research are the meaning of Jargontitis that it can be divided into three parts; 1) Onomatopoeic based Jargon; 2) Blend and Acronym based Jargon; and 3)Pidgin Based Jargon. Therefore, some teenagers will use the jargons in their activities and indirectly they will remember “Aqua” as the focus maker.

The need for peace, unity and development that is sustained is one that has continually been reverberated throughout the nation for a number of decades now. Absence of peace and unity hinders sustainable development, as the existence of these is a prerequisite to achieving sustainable economic development in any nation. Multilingual and multiethnic nature of Nigeria has promoted the divide among Nigerians in this decade more than ever before. There is need for the adoption of a common language acceptable to all. In contemporary Nigeria, we see pidgin bridging the gap incommunication between people of different social status, tribes and religious affiliations, thereby building the right atmosphere for peace, unity and sustainable development to thrive. This papertherefore discussed contexts where Nigerian Pidgin is already in use and advocated that its acceptability in these context indicates that it can be turned to a language for wider communication and a panacea for peace and development in Nigeria

Hawaiʻi Creole or Pidgin is a highly stigmatized language variety spoken by half a million people in the state of Hawaiʻi. The residents of Hawaiʻi and speakers of this language often view it with a complex mixture of both hate and love. Previous discursive approaches to this topic have often focused on the strategic, pragmatic uses of the language for constructing identities and ideologies however the complex and often contradictory nature of Pidgin speakers’ beliefs and attitudes towards their language is often missing from these analyses. In this article, the ideologies of Pidgin are examined through analyzing the comedic skits of Rap Reiplinger, a local comedian whose work still enjoys great popularity over 30 years after his death. By mapping out the indexical fields this article shows how multiple and sometimes opposing ideologies may be simultaneously produced and reproduced in Pidgin comedy routines by the formation of multiple semiotic centers. The analysis will also show how these ideologies are then re-appropriated by others through selective activation of these indexical fields and how the activation of multiple fields can lead to the reproduction of those contradicting beliefs that are at the core of Pidgin speakers attitudes towards their own language.

What Shall be Understood under Creole Language?Creole languages are being formed as a result of language contact in multicultural and multilingual societies. Why is it that some circumstances are advantageous for their formation while others do not positively influence their formation? Which circumstances are crucial in order for a creole language to be formed? What does the entire process look like? Is the formation of a creole language a universal phenomenon or does it depend on the era and the place? Which creole languages are the most common in the world? Where do they come from? Do they have any characteristic features? These are the key questions that this paper attempts to answer.

The article deals with a phenomenon called the Russian pidgin, a language compiled on the basis of the Russian language with an interspersing of the lexical and grammatical elements of the Chinese language. The Russian Pidgin is used in trade and tourism in the cities on both sides of the Amur River. The Russian-Chinese language appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. In China, at one time this language was taught for people trading with Russia; textbooks were published and examining committees were held (Chinese traders, who were going to trade with Russia, were required to pass the exam in the Russian-Chinese language). In the twentieth century, this language went out of use and later it was preserved only in the lives of representatives of the old generation. In the twenty-first century the situation has changed: in the border areas, experts find the use of the Russian-Chinese language with the elements that remind the structures of the Pidgin Era.

The present paper offers a review of Stefano Manfredi’s Arabi Juba: un pidgin-créole du Soudan du Sud (2017), discussing the potential benefits of its methodological approach for the field of Arabic linguistics and dialectology. Manfredi’s volume represents the latest and most comprehensive description of Juba Arabic, a pidgin / creole spoken in South Sudan. It includes a socio-historical introduction describing the conditions from which the speech community that gave rise to Juba Arabic first emerged, followed by nine chapters that provide a detailed description of the language at the phonological, morphological and syntactical levels. The paper also discusses how Manfredi’s approach goes in the direction of a linguistics of speech communities invoked by Magidow (2017) and how it might represent a model for future grammars of dialectal Arabic. Manfredi (2017), in fact, provides a multidimensional description of Juba Arabic, in which the diverse nature of its speakers (monolinguals native speakers vs bilinguals L2 speakers with different L1s) and the prolonged contact with its lexifier language (Sudanese Arabic) give origin to acrolectal and basilectal varieties. Manfredi analyzes internal variation from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, resorting to the concept of “dynamic synchrony” to describe ongoing processes of language change. The linguistic situation of the Arabic-speaking world after the end of the colonial period, on the other hand, witnesses a more and more intense contact between different Arabic dialects and an increased influence from MSA, through mass media and growing rates of literacy. The situation of language contact that results from these circumstances needs more refined conceptual tools in order to be effectively described. For this reason, and in light of Magidow (2017), this review article argues that the approach adopted by Manfredi might be successfully imported in the field of Arabic dialectology.

Several language experiments have been carried out on apes and other animals aiming to narrow down the presumed qualitative gap that separates humans from other animals. These experiments, however, have been driven by the understanding of language as a purely symbolic sign system, often connected to a profound disinterest for language use in real situations and a propensity to perceive grammatical and syntactic information as the only fundamental aspects of human language. For these reasons, the language taught to apes tends to discard iconic and indexical elements in favour of symbolic signs. This paper sheds light on the iconic components of human language, with close attention to the iconic properties of language as present in the ape language experiments. We emphasise the role of the body in the interpretation and production of iconic signs, while demonstrating the need to take into account the Umwelt theory in the research paradigm of the experiments. Uexkull’s Umwelt theory is used to exemplify the methodological problems connected to the teaching of human language to other animal species; furthermore, we discuss how the modelling capacities of language affect the biological layer that constitutes the animal Umwelt. Language is analysed as a particular case of Umwelt transition (Tonnessen), and as such its implications are further discussed in the article. With this paper, we enrich the discussion surrounding the human-ape pidgin language by advocating for the need to include iconic components as vital parts of this research area. With this inclusion, we uncover the inter-dependency of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs in human language, aiming to further develop the research paradigm of the ape language experiments.

Despite the relative abundance of written records from the late 19th century of interactions in Chinese pidgin Spanish (a modified form of Spanish used in business transactions between Chinese merchants in Manila and their customers), few of these texts have made it into the hands ―or research― of Creole experts. Up to now, Chinese pidgin Spanish has been largely dismissed by creolists as an unstable jargon unworthy of their attention. However, the presence and use of stereotypes among the local population, as evidenced by the substantial corpus of surviving documents from this period, demonstrates a certain degree of stability in at least some aspects of the pidgin. The recent discovery of a short dialogue in Chinese pidgin Spanish dating from the early 18th century has pushed the timeline for the language back much further. This article examines the main linguistic features of the dialogue and compares them with those from a century and a half later. The results indicate the prolonged stability of the stereotypes over a period of at least 150 years. The analysis also explores the possible origins of these linguistic forms and how they spread.

Although the Mediterranean contact language Lingua Franca (LF) is generally classified as a pidgin, a closer examination of the specialist literature reveals some doubts regarding this categorization. This paper approaches the classification of LF from the viewpoint of its vocabulary structure and word formation processes. The basis for the study is the lexicon of some 2000 words recorded in the anonymous didactic dictionary of 1830 that constitutes the most detailed source of information about LF. The study finds that the LF word formation processes are a detailed continuation of those of its Romance lexifiers. This finding calls for a refinement of our understanding of LF, and with it of our “typology of contact outcomes” (Winford 1997: 3).

The Mediterranean contact language Lingua Franca (LF), although usually categorized as a pidgin, is known to display a number of non-pidgin-like characteristics. A number of these pertain to its inflection, which shows (for a pidgin) an unusually high degree of retention of lexifier inflectional material. The present paper attempts to situate the inflectional categories of LF, as well as their exponence, between those that are generally found in pidgins and those that characterize LF’s Romance lexifiers. In doing so, the paper contributes both to the descriptive analysis of LF and to the theoretical understanding of its place in the typology of contact languages.

We provide a selective overview of the state of pidgin and creole language studies, with a focus on the different ways in which the question of creole genesis—especially of European-lexifier creoles—is approached: from the perspective of the demographics and periodization of the (early) life of the colonies and from the perspective of the role of typological concepts such as analyticity/syntheticity and simplicity/complexity in the mechanisms of creolization and their linguistic outcomes. We conclude that substrate speakers are most likely to have an impact on the grammar of a creole language if they are among the first to shift to the incipient contact variety, and we find that processes of early second language acquisition and of functional transfer in creolization favor free rather than bound expression of grammatical categories.

In seventeenth-century Dutch theatre many stereotypical German characters appeared on the stage. Uncouth, ridiculous Germans speaking Dutch/German pidgin became a stereotypical joke in comic theatre, and this caricature enhanced the reception and entertainment value of a play. Moreover, playwrights also criticized or denounced moffen (Krauts) in Amsterdam as welfare-grabbers or social-climbers. Criticizing Germans was relatively safe for a playwright. Laughing at others created a sense of solidarity among the audience, us vs. them. Criticizing Dutch culture and populace, however, involved a risk for the author and actors. The audience could take the criticism personally and since theatre needed an audience to survive, this could be very harmful. An author therefore had to anticipate the response of the audience. Because of their relative proximity to the Dutch people, some authors inserted German characters into their plays as instruments to criticize the foibles in Dutch society and class relations in particular. They criticized the exuberance of Amsterdams society, the hypocrisy of rich upstarts, the naivety of those who are easily convinced by fancy titles and members of the working class such as handmaidens with ambition to climb the social ladder.

The study is a sociolinguistic approach to solving security challenges and enhancing sustainable national development in Nigeria. It argues that language and society influences each other and as such language could be used to solve societal problems. In doing so, the paper x-rays the functions of language in human society as propounded by Halliday and Stubbs. It discusses the multilingual nature of Nigeria, the concept of national development as well as security challenges facing the country. The paper notes that the dominant use English language against the indigenous languages in nearly all communicative domains in Nigeria has failed the nation in its bid to overcome numerous security threats. This may not be unconnected with the low literacy level in the country. As a result, the paper recommends a tripartite language policy vis-a-vis the use of English language, the indigenous languages as well as the Nigerian Pidgin depending on the contextual demand. The paper also advocates the adoption of more indigenous languages, apart from the three major ones- Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, for use. This will imply a revision of Nigeria's language policy and the constitutional provisions on language.

This study looks into the apology strategies used by adult speakers of Cameroon Pidgin English, an area which has received little attention. The data consisted of some 105 recalled conversations between an offender and an offendee and the analysis drew from the model developed by Bergman and Kasper [1]. The analysis revealed a number of facts. First the common contexts which require that someone should apologise to his/her mate include, amongst others, lies or gossiping, insulting or embarrassing one’s partner, cheating on or deceiving a partner, and stealing or taking away property without permission. Second, the most common strategies employed by these speakers were found to include: use of illocutionary force device (100% of 105 conversations), recall of the offence (86.67%), use of address terms (66.67%), and lastly, use of devices to reduce the severity of the offence (60%).

This paper considers Pentecostal churches whose names include such globalising terms as “all nations”, “global”, “international”, “universal” and “world”, with a view to uncovering the nature of their language management, as it has not been made explicit in any document. The data come from some 35 churches located in various residential areas of the city of Yaounde. In each church, five members were contacted i.e. one pastor, one church official, one choir leader and one male and one female congregants. The instruments used were a questionnaire, informal discussions, interviews and participant observation. A total of 40 highly motivated research assistants were involved in the data collection process, which took place in January and February 2016. The framework used for the analysis was the structural-functional model. The analysis revealed that the services of these churches contained four to 13 parts and that the languages used to realise these parts were French and English, with translation from one language to the other being systematic. When tongue speaking was used, translation was not done. During Testimonies, congregants not sufficiently competent in French or English occasionally switched to Pidgin or a few Cameroonian languages. Most of these churches were found not to be represented in other countries outside Cameroon and those that were said to use English singly or in combination with other languages, not with French.

Established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) on July3rd 2014, in conjunction with Springer Publishing, publishers of the Society’s official journal, Biosemiotics,the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award seeks to recognize those papers published in the journal thatpresent novel and potentially important contributions to the ongoing project of biosemiotic research, itsscientific impact, and its future prospects. Here the winner of the Biosemiotics Achievement Award for 2018is announced: the award goes to Mirko Cerrone for his article ‘Umwelt and Ape Language Experiments: onthe Role of Iconicity in the Human-Ape Pidgin Language’.

The choice of an official language in a linguistically pluralistic society often poses thorny problems, not least of which is that concerning perceived threats to the linguistic rights of minority language communities. This article discusses the importance of Cameroonian pidgin English (CPE) in relation to the two imperial languages inherited from colonial masters – English and French. I will contend that for the purpose of socio-political integration and national unity in Cameroon, it is incumbent upon policy-makers and language planners to choose pidgin English as one of the official languages in the country. CPE is a national lingua franca spoken by the rich and poor, men and women, educated and uneducated, young and old. Being one of the most widely spoken languages in the country, having met the communicative needs of Cameroonians for more than 500 years, and being a language that carries the identity and ecology of Cameroon, pidgin English has the potential to be promoted to the status of an official language and made to serve as a compromise medium for socio-political integration in an ethnically pluralistic nation such as Cameroon.

The article deals with the language situation and language policy in Nigeria which is one of the most polyethnic African states. Sociolinguistic situation in the country is very complex because there are more than 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria which speak 521 languages. English is the official language in the country and serves Nigerian peoples’ way of life. There are discussions about the development of local indigenous languages in a very complicated ethnic and political situation in Nigeria. The English language in Nigeria interacts with numerous indigenous languages and Nigerian Pidgin English. Nigerian Pidgin Eng-lish is a marker of identity and solidarity between the various ethnic groups. There is polarization of com-municative functions of English and Nigerian Pidgin. English has official functions and is on a higher social level and Nigerian Pidgin is on a lower social level and has everyday functions. English plays a major role in introducing Nigerians to modern knowledge, creating new types of thinking and contributing to the development of national self-awareness.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of ethnic markets through the lens of the specific contact language (“bazaar Pidgin”), arising and used in the process of communication between traders and customers. The paper is based on a comparison of a peculiarity of “Chinese” markets in Russia and “Russian” market Yabaolu in China. The authors demonstrate that these markets reproduce similar communicative sphere. The article demonstrates that a language, performing the communicative function, marks non ethic basis of “ethnic” market, defining it as a border contact space. Based on a comparative analysis authors note that “bazaar pidgin” bear resemblance to contact Russian-Chinese frontier. The authors comes to the conclu-sion that the language, fixed in space markets of Irkutsk and Beijing, creates a situation, reproducing a num-ber of practices, which are typical for the cross-border contacts. These practices realize at a considerable distance from the state borders outside the legal and social context of the borderland. Based on this conclu-sion, the authors, that the change of the contact language of market is a good marker for fixation and analysis of changes in transboundary systems and streams, intersecting at the “ethnic” markets.