![]() ![]() Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where both people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen. Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode… Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it? And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. ![]() And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. There are no estimates of number of speakers for many of them.Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia. Four of them are extinct and many are in the process of disappearing. It continued in use until about the end of the 19th century, when the Chinese started to switch to standard English.Įthnologue lists 18 pidgins used around the world. Its use spread from master-servant relationships to those between English and Chinese traders and bureaucrats. The project involves five space agencies: the United States' NASA, Russia's Roscosmos, Japan's JAXA, Europe's ESA, and Canada's CSA. Chinese Pidgin English ( Chinglish), developed in the 17th century in Canton (Guandong), China,and survived for almost three centuries. The International Space Station, commonly referred to as the ISS, is the largest modular space station in low Earth orbit. The same is true of Pidgin French which disappeared from Vietnam after the French left the country. For instance, Pidgin Russian spoken in Manchuria disappeared when Russian settlers left China after World War II. They disappear when the reason for communication diminishes, as communities either move apart, one community learns the language of the other, or both communities learn a common language (usually the official language of the country). There are other theories about the origin of the term.īecause of their limited function, pidgin languages usually do not last very long, rarely more than several decades. The word, first attested in print in 1850, is thought to be the Chinese mispronunciation of the English word business. The term pidgin has nothing to do with birds. ![]() A good example of a non-European pidgin is the Chinook Jargon that was once used by American Indians and European traders in the Pacific Northwest. However, there are also pidgins spoken in parts of Africa, South America, and southeast Asia that are based on languages other than those of the colonial powers. For example, the establishment of plantation economies in the Caribbean, with large groups of slaves from different language backgrounds who came from West Africa, gave rise to a number of pidgins based on English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese. The major languages are usually the languages of the former major colonial powers, such as English, French, and Portuguese. Usually a pidgin language is a blend of the vocabulary of one major language with the grammar of one or more other languages. Nobody speaks a pidgin as their first language. Pidgins are “on-the-spot” languages that develop when people with no common language come into contact with each other. ![]()
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