Calculator communication in the markets of Guangzhou and beyond

Abstract

The presence of Africans in China has been phenomenal since the late 1990s. In recent years, there has been a dramatic uptick in people from Africa coming to the major cities of China such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Yiwu, Shanghai, and Beijing. They are in the process of building linguistic, cultural, and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities. In this process, communication problems are inevitable, since Africans and Chinese do not share a common lingua franca in most cases. However, these communities have succeeded in devising some interactive strategies that turn out to be quite effective, especially in market situations, one of them being calculator communication (CM). This paper looks at these strategies in the context of contact linguistics and the emergence of some hybrid language that has elements of African languages, Chinese, and English.