From around 1740 up until the Russian revolution in 1917, people from Northwest Russia, from Arkhangelsk and the Kola peninsula, would come to Northern Norway annually to trade. This trade is known as the Pomor trade. Immediately, a problem presented itself: how were people with languages as different as Russian and Norwegian going to communicate? Either of them could learn the other folks’ language, of course, and that’s what they did eventually. But that wasn’t what happened first. A more curious thing happened: the two parties created a simplified contact language, a pidgin, by mixing and matching from the two source languages. The pidgin became known as Russenorsk, and, sadly, it was little more than idle amusement for intellectuals until long after it died out. Only a very small corpus exists.
Pidgins were common around the world, and creoles, which are pidgins that have developed into someone’s native language, aren’t unusual today. You tend to find them in the Carribean, the Pacific and Africa. You don’t tend to find them far north of the Arctic circle. In addition to its unique geography, Russenorsk is also unusually well-balanced, in the sense that it borrows almost equally from both source languages. This is probably owing to the fact that the two sides were social equals. This is unusual for pidgins, so Russenorsk is of interest to those who form theories about how pidgins do or should behave. (There isn’t a whole lot of literature on Russenorsk, but in the literature that exists, you can sense it, because rarely does anyone write about it except to advance some theory about pidgins or “mixed languages” by either using Russenorsk as an example or by trying to refute its being used as an example of a competing theory.)
Librarians, being bibliophiles, love to track down obscure books. At least, in my experience, they do if they work at small libraries where no one ever requests obscure books, where people rarely request books at all except for popular thrillers. I got the impression, at least, that the librarian found it exciting when I requested a Russenorsk: et pidginspråk i Norge (1981), the definite book on Russenorsk. This was a couple years back, so I don’t have access to it, which is too bad, since it contains the entire known corpus of the pidgin.
So what does this trading language look like? A trait common to all pidgins is simplification. Complex morphology and syntax fly away like a fart in the wind, and a small core of words take on a variety of meanings. You could say that pragmatics is king in pidgins: context is everything. Russenorsk, being a trading language, has a core of words mostly related to trade, and, as fun as it would be to imagine such a language, it probably isn’t capable of expressing the full range of things we humans like to talk about. (When pidgins calcify into creoles, i.e., when kids start growing up with a pidgin as their native language, complexity starts creeping in again as needed in order to contain the full range of human expression. But, important! the complexity that was stripped away from the source languages doesn’t magically reappear. The kids who learn the pidgin don’t know either of the source languages, so they invent their own complexities in order to express themselves.)
The lexicon is almost 50/50 Norwegian and Russian, with a small majority of Norwegian words. There are also some words taken from English and Dutch, possibly inherited from international sailor’s jargon. Here’s a document that attempts to analyze its “grammar”, insofar as it has one, from a Russian perspective. A few examples:
In a pidgin, there’s no such thing as purple prose. Here, we see some interesting features: “davaj”, from Russian, is used as a jussive, in the same sense as “let’s” in English. The preposition på/po, which is found both in Norwegian and Russian and in those languages has a range of expression (on, at, in, by, along, etc.), is used for many purposes, both for “on” or “in” and, in other examples, to introduce relative clauses. Many verbs have an inseparable suffix -om. There are no tenses or aspects. The pronouns moja “I” and tjova “you” are Russian in origin, and are also used as genitives. (We also see ju “you”, from English. Russenorsk has many doublets, often with the Russian word used by Norwegians and the Norwegian word used by Russians.)
Here’s the longest attested fragment of Russenorsk: Moja på anner skib nokka vin drikkom, så nokka lite pjan, så moja spaserom på lan på selskab anner rusman, så polisman grot vret på russmann, så rusman på kastel slipom. “I drank some wine on another ship, so I was a little drunk, then I went on shore with some other Russians, but a police man got very angry with the Russians, so the Russians slept in jail.” Owing to the limited vocabulary and structure, it gets a little repetitive.
The syntax, to the degree that there is one, is Subject-Object-Verb. The basic word order in both Russian and Norwegian is SVO (although Russian is more flexible). It would seem rather odd that the word order contradicts the natural word order of both source languages; some theorize, therefore, that Russenorsk must have been developed from an earlier pidgin, perhaps a Russian-Finnish pidgin or, I seem to recall from the book, even a Chinese-Russian (!) pidgin. Another outlier is the existential sense of liggene “lie down”.
The Pomor trade ended in 1917. Even before that, Russenorsk may have been in heavy decline, as more Norwegians who traded with Russians learned Russian. A low-status trading language like Russenorsk wasn’t taken seriously, and the people who used it had no use for putting it into writing. By the time linguists took a serious interest in it, the pidgin was dead. I think it’s really interesting, but all the competent speakers are long dead, and the likelihood that some hidden manuscript contains further source text is minimal.
In the vein of exotic northern pidgins, there existed a Basque-Icelandic pidgin in Iceland as early as 1600. This one actually has contemporaneous written vocabularies!
PS: the Norwegians never slew any stranded Russians, so there’s that.
Nov 4, 2010