The Linguistic World of the Early English East India Company: A Study of the English Factory in Japan, 1613–1623

Abstract

This article looks at the multilingual environment of the English East India Company (EIC) trading post in Japan, 1613–23. Reconstructing the linguistic world of early EIC merchants in Southeast Asia may appear straightforward: the primary lingua francas across the Asian seaboard were Portuguese and Malay. But knowledge of these two languages alone was not enough to conduct business at trading posts in dozens of locations across a region where more than two thousand languages were spoken. To form a complete picture of the linguistic environment of EIC merchants in the East Indies, together with an understanding of the linguistic competence of the English merchants, direct references to language use must be supplemented with indirect evidence drawn from the linguistic record. EIC merchants' letters are full of loanwords and borrowed phrases from foreign languages. An analysis of these words and phrases using quantitative methods borrowed from corpus linguistics bolsters the results gained from the qualitative analysis of the texts in their social contexts. These joined results yield new insights into the daily lives of EIC merchants and open a neglected avenue of investigation into the voluminous records of the English East India Company.