Yilan Creole Japanese

It arose in the 1930s and 1940s, with contact between Japanese colonists and the native Atayal people of southern Yilan County, Taiwan.

The vocabulary of a speaker born in 1974 was 70% Japanese and 30% Atayal, but the grammar of the creole does not closely resemble either of the source languages.

[3] The creole was identified in 2006 by Chien Yuehchen and Sanada Shinji, but its existence is still largely unknown.

[7] During the latter period of this time, Imperial Japan enforced Taiwanese assimilation to Japanese language and culture.

[7] As a result of this contact between the Atayal and Japanese languages, Yilan Creole surfaced.

[5][4] Although the exact number of Yilan Creole speakers is unknown, it is likely less than the total population of the four villages, which is 3,000.

[5] After a push for preserving a more traditional and pure sense of Atayal heritage, Yilan Creole that is imbued with Japanese features was removed from language examinations.

This further instilled a tendency toward Mandarin and a push away from Yilan Creole in young speakers.

[3] Atayal consonants that Yilan Creole inherited include the glottal stop /ʔ/, the alveolar lateral approximant /l/, and the velar fricative /x/.

[3] The rounding of /u/ in Yilan Creole is that of the protrusion of [u] in Atayal, as opposed to the compression of [ɯᵝ] in Japanese.

[3] Some processes of negation in Yilan Creole use Japanese derived forms to accommodate the realis mood that is part of Atayal grammar.

[5] Many Atayal words relating to nature, animals, and plants survived in the creole.

Vocabulary of most concepts such as these related to traditional Atayal and Seediq life and culture are retained in Yilan Creole.

[5] Also, Yilan Creole –suru can attach to nouns, adjectives, and, among young generational speakers, verbs.

However, while Japanese inflection differs between consonant versus vowel ending verbs, the Yilan Creole suffix does not.

Unlike Japanese, adjectives in the creole languages are not inflected and tense is expressed through temporal adverbs.