the future of Pidgin Power , with experts from Cameroon, Nigeria,
Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Gambia to get down on standardizing
some of it, and giving some leeway (and much grammatical &
lexicological tolerance) to regional variations.
It's already a language of commerce, in the region.
There are already a number of Krio dictionaries of the indigenous
Sierra Leone variety which is that nation's linguafranca…
Farooq Kperogi the doyen of his own special interest (Nigerian
English) must surely have some ideas about this. Perhaps he himself
would like to set up a Commission to look into the matter and report
back to him? (Smile)
On Dec 28, 7:42 pm, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelb...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/09/nigeria-pidgin-learni...
>
> 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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