The syntax and lexicon of Thai pidgin english in Phuket

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the syntax and lexicon of Thai Pidgin English in a community named Rawai, Phuket. Data was collected by tape-recording conversations of thirty informants. They are divided into two groups: traders and inter-married families. The results illustrate that Thai Pidgin English spoken in Phuket is a contact language containing features different from those in Standard English in terms of sentence structure and grammatical patterns; e.g., use of serial verb and the lack of inflectional morphology, as well as lexical usage; e.g., semantic broadening and word creation. Those characteristics show the influence of the first language on constructing another language, and they also correspond to what has been suggested in previous studies of pidgins. Moreover, the situations of speaking Thai Pidgin English in Phuket do not only cover trading circumstances, but also extend to wider contexts.