From Merchants of Innovation: The Language of Traders, ed. by Esther-Miriam Wagner, Bettina Beinhoff & Ben Outhwaite [Studies in Language Change 15]. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 132–157.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
The initial target of the English East India Company was Southeast Asia. As a result, for the first few decades of the 17th century, the Company’s trading posts were relatively isolated micro-communities who lived and traded within the complex multilingual trading world of maritime Asia. Thus the early records of the English East India Company (EIC) provide excellent material for the study of a community of practice, and can reveal the effects of language contact in real time.
This article looks at multilingualism in the early correspondence of EIC mer- chants, namely the records of the EIC trading post in Japan, 1613–1623. The focus is on direct evidence of language contact seen in the form of code-switching and lexical borrowing in the letters. The study shows that code-switching and borrow- ing do provide evidence of an EIC community of practice.