about

Travelling is an ancient and constant human activity. People travel for different reasons – survival, settlement, occupation, mission, trade, vacation, etc. The 19th century was a revolutionary period as advances in transportation and innovations in communication enabled long distant cross-border travel. It was also during this period that empire expansion and global trade reached their golden era. Interestingly, though separated from their familiar, travellers began their journeys to explore new places, meet new people, and interact with them in different languages. Without travelling, such contact in culture and language would not be possible. 

In Visualizing Language Contact, we are going to see cases of creations of new words, new meanings, and new languages in order to appreciate the linguistic and cultural impact of different people coming into contact. Though often referred to as an activity of moving from one place to another, travelling implies preparing ourselves for understanding and accepting things and people that are unfamiliar to us. As Alain de Botton said in his book The Art of Travel: “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

Language is an important medium that enables us to understand the new environment. Physical movement of people means the potential for cross-linguistic influence in the course of knowledge exchange and transmission. Borrowing foreign words in order to express new concepts, for example, is the most common form of integrating a foreign language into our own. In some situations, contact goes beyond words and result in the formation of new languages such as Chinese Pidgin English – a language spoken in the treating ports of China and Hong Kong from the 18th to the mid-20th century. This language will serve as the primary focus to illustrate the linguistic, social, and cultural interactions between Chinese and foreigners.

The images accompanying the text are paper ephemera, especially postcards which provided popular depictions of people, places, and languages at the time of their production.