1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pidgin English

PIDGIN [or Pigeon] ENGLISH, the lingua franca of the seaports of China, the Straits Settlements in the Far East, consisting in a jargon of corrupted English words with some intermixture of Portuguese and Malay, following Chinese idiomatic usage. It is employed as a means of communication between foreigners and the native Chinese. The word “pidgin” is the Chinese corruption of “business.”