Hello, does anyone know how was Yokohama pidgin Japanese written? I mean whether it was written in katakana or romaji. In Japanese sources it’s written in katakana and in English sources in romaji. So I’m stuck. I need it because of my thesis and cannot find it anywhere.
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Why not both? As well as whatever Chinese dialect was spoken/written? Pidgins as you know are developed as spoken languages until/if they reach the stage of Creole (if ever, and maybe even then.) What I mean is that because there were differing language speakers involved, the writing form would depend on understandability. Japanese would not need to write/use the pidgin among themselves, nor would the non-Japanese traders. Would documents in pidgin even need to be written? If so, would there be a standardization?
[Article](https://www.jstor.org/stable/30027959)
I never heard of Yokohama Pidgin Japanese … the Wikipedia’s sources are fascinating
Sidenote, have you read the [“Revised and Enlarged Edition of Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect”](https://archive.org/details/revisedenlargede00atki/page/16/mode/2up)?
How much of that is legitimately representative of the ‘Yokohama pidgin’ and how much is tongue-in-cheek? It’s bloody hilarious reading!