At the time, Pidgin was regarded as a language for the local elite, who benefited from the slave trade of their own people. Then came the British, who developed a more robust form of communication with local chieftains in the 17th and 18th centuries. Vestiges of Portuguese remain - for example, “pequenho,” the Portuguese word for “small,” evolved into “pikin,” the Pidgin word for “child.” “Sabi,” the Pidgin word for “to know,” comes from the Portuguese verb “saber.” West African Pidgin has its origins in the 15th century, when Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to reach the western shores of Africa, looking for copper, ivory and pepper, as well as slaves. She commended the BBC’s decision to offer the service, saying it helped remove the stigma attached to Pidgin, often derided as a corruption of standard English. Pidgin helps bring together, at least linguistically, large parts of a continent carved up by European colonizers who were later replaced, in many cases, by corrupt leaders. An opera sung in West African Pidgin was staged two years ago in London, a world first. Today, she says, it represents African pride, seen in the flourishing number of radio stations and television programs that use Pidgin. Pidgin does have its own grammar, phonetics and vocabulary, linguistic experts say, and it has historical and cultural significance in West Africa. (“Bill Gates: ‘Nigeria dey important,’ ” the headline on the BBC Pidgin site later read.) The British high commissioner to Nigeria, Paul Thomas Arkwright, also appeared in a BBC clip, speaking Pidgin rather fluently. Since the Pidgin service started in August, Bill Gates tried his hand at speaking the language in a BBC interview, where he responded to questions from Nigerians, many of whom speak a variant called Naija, or Nigerian Pidgin. Ewokor’s dictionary, “adrenaline,” for example, is translated to “power dey pump for im brain.” Drunken driving is translated as “drunkaman driving.”
“I’m creating rules that we never had before,” he said. There are no formal ways of learning it people simply pick it up.Ĭhris Ewokor is helping the BBC effort by putting together a linguistic guide. The team is also trying to pioneer a standardized written form of Pidgin, which is primarily a spoken language. This has fueled debates among staff members over word choices: should, for example, an article use a word from Cameroonian pidgin, or from Nigerian pidgin, the most widely spoken variant. There are many variants of pidgin spoken across West Africa, from Mauritania in the north to Nigeria and English-speaking parts of Cameroon in the south, and the BBC said it is using a mélange in an effort to create some sort of regional standard. More than 75 million people are thought to speak the language, either as their primary or secondary tongue.
While Pidgin is looked down upon by some, the word itself is not derogatory. In schools, teachers warned students about the dangers of what they considered a “deviant” language. “We’re reaching new audiences in a language that is popular,” said Bilkisu Labaran, who oversees the service in West African Pidgin and who grew up speaking it, in spite of her parents’ disapproval. The media organization says it aims to reach 500 million people by its centenary in 2022, about twice the current figure. The BBC also has a website in Korean, and it broadcasts radio programs in Korean that can reach the reclusive state of North Korea, bringing the total number of languages it uses to more than 40. It plans to add the West African languages Igbo and Yoruba next year. In addition to West African Pidgin English, the service now delivers news in Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Tigrinya (languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea and other parts of Africa) and in Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Telugu (spoken in India), among others. The expansion, the BBC’s biggest since the 1940s, was funded by a British government grant of about 290 million pounds, or $380 million.
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