Nigerian pidgin

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Nigerian pidgin is a pidgin and creole language spoken in Nigeria that is predominantly English- based .

Pidgin first developed in Nigeria in the Niger Delta . The region as well as the whole country had a multilingual tradition long before the arrival of European traders, as trade, travel, marriages between members of different tribes and shared city life had led to a close network of different language communities.

How exactly the Nigerian pidgin came about is not entirely clear. The existence of pidginized variants of Nigerian languages ​​is possible at a very early stage. The origin of Nigerian pidgin from one of these pidginized Nigerian languages ​​is likely. Pidgin in Nigeria could also have existed in parallel to indigenous languages ​​such as Igbo . Another possibility is the influence of Christian-speaking missionaries from Sierra Leone . The predominantly English-based lexicon is probably due to the importance of trading with Europeans, who were hardly inclined to learn the local languages, as well as to the colonial rule of England over Nigeria. However, apart from communicating with European traders or with missionaries, pidgin was mainly used by Nigerians among themselves, which is why the genesis of this language cannot currently be fully explained.

Today the Nigerian pidgin is an important link between English-based pidgins and Creole languages on the Atlantic Ocean . In 1996 it was estimated that in addition to the 40 million people who had acquired the language as a second language, there were already over a million native speakers. It is also important that the linguistic situation in Nigeria, with its 400 or so languages, is extremely complex. In addition to English, which is the official language, Hausa , Igbo and Yoruba are important semi-official languages ​​and, like Pidgin, serve as linguae francae . However, the Nigerian pidgin has the advantage of crossing ethnic borders and thus being able to integrate the entire population of the country.

In the meantime, pidgin is used by Nigerian students outside Nigeria, especially in England, as a funny and perhaps also identity-creating language among themselves and for their forums on the Internet.

literature

  • Nicolas G. Faraclas: Nigerian Pidgin. Routledge, London 1996.
  • Francis O. Egbokhare: The Story of a Language. Nigerian Pidgin in Spatiotemporal, Social and Linguistic Context. In: Peter Lucko, Lothar Peter, Hans-G. Wolǎf (Ed.): Studies in African Varieties of English. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 21–40.