Series: Learning English
Nigeria harnesses Pidgin English power
Work has started to study and standardise a language spoken by
millions but denied official status, raising hopes for education and
communication across West Africa
The traffic gridlock of Nigeria's main city Lagos means that Albanus
Olekaibe, a 44-year-old contract driver, spends more of his day
listening to radio presenters than to anyone else.
He has been following reports of the latest bribery scandal to beset
the World Cup football authorities and he can speak knowledgeably on
the midterm elections in the US. But the commentary on current affairs
that spills from this big, cheerful man would be incomprehensible to
the average English speaker. Olekaibe uses familiar English words but
strings them together in a unique way, interspersed with phrases from
Nigeria's 500 other languages. Like some 50 million Nigerians he
speaks Nigerian Pidgin English.
His source of news is Wazobia FM, the first radio station in Nigeria
to broadcast in Pidgin and registering huge audiences as a result. The
station's newsreaders report on the impending monsoon in south-east
Asia: "Dem dey run comot for dem house" (People are fleeing their
homes).
Long considered the language of the uneducated, Nigerian Pidgin
English, with its oscillating tones and playful imagery, is now spoken
by Nigerians of every age, social class and regional origin.
In a country with wide disparity in education provision, Pidgin
operates as a de facto lingua franca, a bridge between social classes,
ethnicities and educational levels. Public announcements and
information campaigns are often made in Pidgin, which has a wider
reach than standard English, the official language of this former
British colony.
But while Nigerian Pidgin first emerged nearly 600 years ago, when
trade with Europe was first established in the Niger Delta, and is now
estimated to be used by 50 million people, and with variants spoken in
Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the language still has no standard
rules for spelling, grammar or an official dictionary.
As a Nigerian linguist once put it, "Na like pikin we no get papa, we
no get mama" (It is like a child without a father or mother). Everyone
uses Pidgin to serve their purpose, but no one looks out for it.
That is what the Naija Languej Akademi is seeking to change by
creating the first reference guide for Pidgin English,
which will include an alphabet, a comprehensive dictionary, a standard
guide to orthography and an authoritative history of the language.
"The fact that it is a very recent development makes the language very
interesting from an intellectual point of view," said Bernard Caron, a
French linguist and secretary of the Akademi, a project set up last
year with French government funding to promote research in the social
sciences and the humanities, and enhance collaborative work between
scholars in France and west Africa.
Caron and his mostly Nigerian colleagues prefer to call the language
Naija Languej, arguing that the term Pidgin or the alternative "broken
English" are either inaccurate or derogatory.
Pidgin is a definition applied to simplistic languages that are prone
to die out. If, however, they evolve and acquire native speakers, they
are categorised as creole languages.
The Naija Languej Akademi argues that Nigerian Pidgin has acquired
native speakers in the southern Niger Delta, from where it developed
as a means of communication between local people and European traders.
The interest in Pidgin is not only intellectual but also political.
Because similar forms of Pidgin are shared across west Africa's
English-speaking countries, many believe it could evolve from a
national lingua franca into a regional one.
The value of Pidgin has also been brought into focus by falling
attainment in standard English. This year's NECO exam, one of two
tests used to administer secondary school leaving certificates,
revealed that only 20% of the 1.1 million candidates passed the
English-language paper, fuelling a national debate over the dire state
of education standards.
"We even have 14-year-old children in our programme who cannot read,"
said Patrick Oragwu, co-ordinator of Oasis, a not-for profit project
establishing libraries in government funded schools to encourage
reading.
"The main problem is that the Nigerian education system has failed.
All the languages students are exposed to [have an impact on] their
ability to read and understand properly. Not just Pidgin, but all
languages affect them."
Urban Nigerians are used to switching from one language to the next,
but without good grounding in basic grammar and orthography of either
English or their mother tongue, code switching becomes more difficult.
Addressing the needs of multilingual societies was first highlighted
40 years ago when Unesco published a study showing that primary-school-
aged children learn better when taught in their mother tongue. Mother-
tongue education was championed in Nigeria in the 1970s by the
pioneering education minister Babs Fafunwa, who died aged 87 last
month, but the policy was never implemented.
Dr Christine Ofulue, a linguist and member of the Akademi, explains
that teaching mother tongues in schools, including Pidgin, will
improve students' English. "We call it contrastive linguistics," she
said. "It's the opposite to saying: 'Let's not teach so we don't
confuse them.' When you do that you do confuse them and you can use
the same argument for other languages."
But before any strong case can be made for teaching Pidgin as a
language in schools, spelling first needs to be standardised. And so
members of the Naija Languej Akademi have tasked themselves with
answering questions such as where to put accents to indicate vowel
sounds: far-reaching decisions that few 21st-century linguists get to
make.
Outside the world of academics and policymakers, Nigerian Pidgin
English is simply the way millions of Nigerians communicate.
Olekaibe's dial is permanently turned to Wazobia FM, overlooking about
20 other stations on offer. Lately though he has been missing the
familiar voices that make Lagos traffic more bearable because his
stereo is broken. "My radio don bad, a just de wait make dem fix am!"
Due to a production error, the original version of this article stated
that Pidgin originated in Nigeria 60 years ago, this has been
corrected to 600 years
--
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