Nigerian Pidgin or NPE, also known simply as Pidgin or as Naijá in scholarship, is an English-based creole language spoken as a lingua franca or vehicular language across Nigeria. The language is sometimes referred to as Pijin or Vernacular, and it has over time become the speech form with the widest geographical coverage and largest amount of speakers in Nigeria besides English.
Coming into existence during the 17th and 18th centuries as a result of contact between Britons and Africans involved in the Atlantic slave trade, in the 2010s, a common orthography was developed for Pidgin which has been gaining significant popularity in giving the language a harmonized writing system.
It can be spoken as a pidgin, a creole, a dialect, or a decreolised acrolect by different speakers, who may switch between these forms depending on the social setting. Variations of what this article refers to as "Nigerian Pidgin" are also spoken across West and Central Africa, in countries such as Benin, Ghana, and Cameroon.
Status
Nigerian Pidgin is commonly used throughout the country and across ethnic groups, but it does not have official status.
In 2011, Google launched a search interface in Pidgin. In 2017, the BBC started BBC News Pidgin to provide services in Pidgin. has also found its way to Jamaican patois and Sranantongo (Surinamese Creole) with the same meaning.
- Igbo – , meaning "please", For example, the sentence 'Free me biko' means "Please leave me alone".
- Yoruba – , equivalent to the English term "boss, patron or mentor", has been adopted from the Yoruba word Ọ̀gá, e.g. 'My Oga dey come' means "My boss is coming."
- Hausa – , used at the end of an interrogative sentence or question e.g. 'You no wan come, ba?' means "You don't want to come, right?"
- Portuguese – (or Sabi), means "to know". For example, 'Why you no go sabi the man?' means "How can you say you do not know the man?"
- Portuguese - pequenino (Pikin), means "small" "small one". For example, "Wetin man pikin go do?" Means what will a man's child do?
Nigerian Pidgin is most widely spoken in the oil-rich Niger Delta region where a lot of the population now speak it as a first language, due to the region's high linguistic diversity and the lack of an indigenous lingua franca. There are accounts of pidgin being spoken first in colonial Nigeria before being adopted by other countries along the West African coast.
While Pidgin is spoken by many, there are wide swathes of Nigeria where Pidgin is not spoken or understood, especially among those with neither secular education nor exposure in the far northern reaches of Nigeria.
Relationship to other languages and dialects
Similarity to Caribbean Creoles
Nigerian Pidgin, along with the various pidgin and creole languages of West Africa, share multiple similarities to the various English-based Creoles found in the Caribbean. Linguists posit that this is because most of the enslaved that were taken to the New World were of West African descent.
The pronunciation and accents often differ a great deal, mainly due to the extremely heterogeneous mix of African languages present in the West Indies, but if written on paper or spoken slowly, the creole languages of the Caribbean are for the most part mutually intelligible with the creole languages of West Africa.
The presence of repetitive phrases in Caribbean Creole such as su-su (gossip) and pyaa-pyaa (sickly) mirror the presence of such phrases in West African languages such as bam-bam, which means "complete" in the Yoruba language.
Repetitious phrases are also very present in Nigerian Pidgin, such as koro-koro meaning "clear vision", yama-yama meaning "disgusting", and doti-doti meaning "garbage".
Words of West African origin in Surinamese Creole (Sranan Tongo) and Jamaican Patois, such as unu and Bajan dialect wunna or una – West African Pidgin (meaning "you people", a word that comes from the Igbo word unu or unuwa also meaning "you people"), display some of the interesting similarities between the English pidgins and creoles of West Africa and the English pidgins and creoles of the Caribbean, as does the presence of words and phrases that are identical in the languages on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Me a go tell dem (I'm going to tell them) and make we (let us).
A copula deh or dey is found in both Caribbean Creole and Nigerian Pidgin English.
The phrase We dey foh London would be understood by both a speaker of Creole and a speaker of Nigerian Pidgin to mean "We are in London" (although the Jamaican is more likely to say Wi de a London and the Surinamese way is Wi de na London.)
The word originates from the Igbo word di meaning the same thing and pronounced similarly: anu di na ofe (literally "meat is in soup") and anyi di na london (lit. "we are in London").
Other similarities, such as pikin (Nigerian Pidgin for "child") and pikney or pickney (used in islands like Jamaica, Saint Vincent, Antigua and St. Kitts, akin to the standard-English pejorative/epithet pickaninny) and chook (Nigerian Pidgin for "poke" or "stab") which corresponds with the Trinidadian creole word juk, and also corresponds to chook used in other West Indian islands.
Connection to Portuguese language
Being derived partly from the present day Edo/Delta and other south South area of Nigeria, there are still some words left over from the Portuguese language in pidgin English (Portuguese ships traded slaves from the Bight of Benin). For example, you sabi do am? means "do you know how to do it?". Sabi means "to know" or "to know how to", just as "to know" is saber in Portuguese. (According to the monogenetic theory of pidgins, sabir was a basic word in Mediterranean Lingua Franca, brought to West Africa through Portuguese pidgin. An English related word is savvy.) Also, pikin or "pickaninny" comes from the Portuguese words pequeno and pequenino, which mean "small" and "small child" respectively.
Nigerian English
Similar to the Caribbean Creole situation, Nigerian Pidgin is mostly used in informal conversations. Nigerian Pidgin has no status as an official language. Nigerian English is used in politics, education, science, and media. In Nigeria, English is acquired through formal education. One rival suggestion is that Nigerian Pidgin "is something of a pitch-accent language in which, given a word there may be only one high tone, or one sequence thereof in opposition to one low sequence"; or ("master, chief"); compare from the same source. The phrase may be used to show respect to someone in a position of authority. The phrase came to prominence around 2013 when Channels TV's morning program Sunrise Daily interviewed Obafaiye Shem, the Lagos State Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps. When asked about the corps's official website, Shem replied, "The one that we are going to make use of is going to be made known by my oga at the top. Yes. I can't announce one now and my oga says it's another one." The phrase and Shem's use of it subsequently became an object of sometimes derisive humor.