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Abstract

This thesis explores the origins, social functions, and linguistic characteristics of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) and Chinese Pidgin Russian (CPR) in China’s intercultural contact zones of Shanghai and Harbin from the 1850s to the 1940s. By examining how CPE and CPR facilitated communication across diverse social strata, this study challenges traditional views of pidgins as simplistic or incomplete forms of language. This study shows that CPE and CPR were widely used across language and social boundaries in both Shanghai and Harbin, with neither ethnicity nor social hierarchy limiting their application. In addition, this study reveals that learners’ age, language-learning environments, and fossilization greated shaped CPE and CPR. The lack of structured language education fostered user-driven, context-dependent learning. As a result, both learners’ cognitive process and communication strategy lead to interlanguage fossilization. It is the learners’ pragmatic choice that when mutual intelligibility serves functional purposes of communicaiton, language acquisition stops. Thus the case of CPE and CPR reflect intentional, cooperative strategies rather than language learning deficiency. In addition, this study proposes a dual-layered Cooperation Theory of pidgin genesis, highlighting the mutual motivations and acculturation factors including social dominance patterns, duration of contact, and instrumental motivation. Ultimately, the study redefines CPE and CPR as adaptive, competent communication tools that met the needs of diverse users in the communication setting. This research contributes to our understanding of pidgin languages and provides new perspectives on language acquisition and intercultural communication, with implications for contemporary language contexts in China.