These pidgins also rely on the tones, pitch, nasality of the indigenous languages for proper pronunciation and use. And it will be appreciated and understood.īulk of the lexical items found in these pidgins is from the foreign language spoken locally while the others are from indigenous languages. Sometimes, if you don’t have a word for something, you can just create an onomatopoeic sound and just express yourself. It keeps changing all the time and it’s expressive as well. The BBC Pidgin experiences this fluidity in practise, as its head, Bilkisu Labran, explains: The vocabularies of pidgins evolve all the time to meet the communicative needs of their speakers. It has featured prominently in culture, from Afrobeat superstar Fela Kuti’s urban dance music to highbrow opera like in Nigerian-born singer Helen Parker-Jayne’s Song Queen: A Pidgin Opera. In Nigeria for example, Pidgin is viewed as being the language of illiterates even though it’s used by both educated and uneducated people in formal and informal activities. These pidgins are now creoles – that is a language that was a pidgin but has become a first language for a new generation of speakers. In West Africa children and adults use pidgins as their first language. One of the reasons it that there’s a view that pidgin doesn’t have native speakers. Some, if not all, of these pidgins have outgrown their status as pidgins. They include: Nigerian Pidgin, Sierra Leone Pidgin (also known as Krio), Ghanaian pidgin, Senegalese Pidgin and Cameroonian Pidgin. Trade and colonisation brought pidgin to West Africa. Governments in the region should take a leaf out of the broadcaster’s book and ensure the different versions are codified and standardised in both their formal and informal uses.
Pidgins deserve full recognition because they’re being spoken by a sizeable number of people in West Africa. The BBC’s decision to launch a service in Pidgin should be applauded. This is because in one English is the dominant European language while in the other French is dominant. For example, the version spoken in Nigeria is different from the version spoken in Senegal. Pidgin is used differently in different settings.
The mixing has developed into lingua franca of the region. In West Africa these mixes include English and French, on the one hand, and local languages on the other. Pidgin refers to what’s known as a trade language that emerged as a mixture of languages to help people who don’t have a common one to communicate with one another. They are also taught in some tertiary institutions, used in music and other works of art and even speeches by public officials. Today, variations of pidgins are used in all spheres of life ranging from political campaigns, television and radio broadcast.
Between three and five million Nigerians use it as their first language, while a further 75 million have it as their second language. According to the broadcaster it News Pidgin reaches a weekly audience of 7.5 million people in Nigeria and around the world on radio, online, Facebook and Instagram.Įven though Pidgin hasn’t got the official status of a recognised language anywhere, it’s widely spoken across West Africa. The BBC World Service’s radio service of English-based Pidgin for West and Central Africa, BBC News Pidgin, is now a year old.
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