Bamboo English
Bamboo English was a Japanese Pidgin-English jargon developed after World War II that was spoken between American military personnel and the Japanese on US military bases in occupied Japan. It has been thought to be a pidgin, though analysis of the language's features indicates it to be a pre-pidgin or a jargon rather than a stable pidgin.
| Bamboo English | |
|---|---|
| Japanese Bamboo English Korean Bamboo English | |
| Region | Japan, South Korea, Bonin Islands |
| Era | since ca. 1950 |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
| IETF | cpe-JP |
It was exported to Korea during the Korean War by American military personnel as a method of communicating with Koreans. Here it acquired some Korean words, but remained largely based on English and Japanese. Recently, it has been most widely used in Okinawa Prefecture, where there is a significant U.S. military presence.
The Bonin Islands feature a similar form of Japanese Pidgin English referred to as Bonin English. This contact language was developed due to a back-and-forth shift in dominant languages between English and Japanese spanning over one hundred years.
The name Bamboo English was coined by Arthur M. Z. Norman in an article, where he initially described the language.