It keeps changing all the time, and it’s expressive as well.” That is why it is easy for a Yoruba native speaker who speaks pidgin to make syntactic construction such as “my heart dey do gbimgbim” which translates into “my heart beats fast”. As Bilikisu Labaran, the head of the new BBC Pidgin, puts it, “It is quite fluid. That is, it is unstable and likely to change often.

However, they are usually mutually intelligible. There are differences in these varieties in each, the English language is mixed with other languages in the country.

For instance, in Nigeria, there is the Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) which has its peculiar features when compared with the pidgin spoken in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Cameroon. Right from its birth, the West African Pidgin English has experienced considerable growth, and there are even offshoots of it based on region. Afterwards, the British slave merchants dominated the slave trade, and consequently, they (the British) and the local African traders developed and improved the language to facilitate their commercial activities.

The remnant of some words which are of Portuguese origin in today’s West-African pidgin English includes “sabi” (to know) and “pikin” (child). History has it that Portuguese traders were the first set of Europeans to trade in West Africa in the 15th century. The West African Pidgin English was a language of commerce between British and African slave traders during the Atlantic slave trade around the 17th and 18th centuries. It is the root of many other interesting phenomena, including the advent of pidgin and creole-a pidgin that has grown into having native speakers. Language contact is an interesting linguistic phenomenon.

Pidgin, this new form, usually composed of basic elements of two or more languages, arises from language contact and can be built from words, sounds, or body language. When two people with different native languages meet, and there is the need for them to communicate, they might be forced to express themselves in a thwarted form of their languages which over time can give rise to a new form of language.

African pidgin english