| Bamboo English | |
|---|---|
| Japanese Bamboo English Korean Bamboo English | |
| Region | Japan (Bonin Islands), South Korea |
| Era | since ca. 1950 |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
| IETF | cpe-JP |
Bamboo English was a Japanese pidgin-English jargon developed after World War II that was spoken between American military personnel and Japanese on US military bases in occupied Japan. It has been thought to be a pidgin,[1] though analysis of the language's features indicates it to be a pre-pidgin or a jargon rather than a stable pidgin.[2]
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,[3] where there is a significant U.S. military presence.
The Ogasawara 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.[4]
The name Bamboo English was coined by Arthur M. Z. Norman in an article,[5] where he initially described the language.