Chinese Pidgin Russian: Its Features, Origins, and Fate

Chinese Pidgin Russian (CPR) was a marginal yet peculiar element of China’s complex linguistic landscape, mainly documented in the 19th and 20th centuries in places like Kjachta, Harbin, and Vladivostok, used by the Chinese in their interactions with the Russians. Historically, CPR has caught the attention of sinologists and specialists in pidgin and creole studies for its distance from most recorded pidgin languages and its unique features, resulting from the complex interplay between superstrate and substrate elements. Bringing together data from separate historical attestations of CPR and observations from secondary sources in multiple languages, this article aims to provide a survey of CPR grammar with etymological comments as well as reconstruct its origins through an analysis of its constituting elements and posit a new explanation for its eventual fate.