A comparison of the varieties of West African Pidgin English

Abstract

: In recent years, a number of studies on the national varieties of West African Standard English have taken a comparative perspective, mostly dealing with phonetics (e.g. Simo Bobda, 1995, 2000a, b, 2003; Simo Bobda et al., 1999), but also with the lexicon (Wolf and Igboanusi, 2003). Similar efforts with respect to the national varieties of Pidgin English spoken in West Africa. i.e. Ghanaian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Cameroon Pidgin English, have been lacking so far, if one disregards the listing of diagnostic features in Huber (1999) and some implicit comparisons in Njeuma (1995). Our paper is intended to be the first descriptive and systematic account of features that distinguish these varieties from one another. Considering differences on the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical level, we will draw from findings by other linguists who have investigated individual varieties of West African Pidgin English (e.g. Huber, 1999 on Ghanaian Pidgin English; Elugbe and Omamor, 1991 and Faraclas, 1996 on Nigerian Pidgin English; and Mbassi‐Manga, 1973 and de Féral, 1989 on Cameroon Pidgin English), but also on our own research, which is based on dozens of interviews with speakers of West African Pidgin English.

The structure of idioms in Nigerian English

“…The sources of NigE can also be sources for idioms unique to NigE (cf. Adegbija, 2004; Peter & Wolf, 2007; Mgbemena, 2014; Kperogi, 2015). The sources can be summarised as below.…”

Empowering Nigerian Pidgin: a challenge for status planning?

“…The last three examples are pronounced with low‐high tones as a result of incorrect stress placement 4 . Such influences or interference may facilitate or impede learning of another language (see Peter and Wolf, 2007). In response to the problem of interference in second or foreign language learning, a contrastive analysis has been developed as a learning or teaching strategy to eliminate errors in learning (see Odlin, 1989).…”

The spoken corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English

“…They find that the structural features of WAPEs and WAEs correspond quite closely, especially in phonology, less so in lexis. These authors conclude that WAPE and WAE varieties are (structurally) not independent of one another (Peter & Wolf : 18). In light of these findings, we would expect similarities between findings derived from our CPE corpus and from CCE.…”

“…In order to evaluate the comparability of the CPE corpus both to: (i) the ICE project; and (ii) to other corpora of varieties of English in Africa, we conducted some (lexical) case studies comparing the CPE corpus with ICE-NIGERIA (Wunder et al 2010) and with the Corpus of Cameroon English (CCE), consisting of over 800,000 words of written standardised Cameroon English (Tiomajou 1993;Nkemleke & Mbangwana 2007). To investigate the hypothesis that there is a strong relation between West African Pidgin English (WAPE) and their corresponding national variety of West African (Standardised) English (WAE), Peter and Wolf (2007) compare Ghanaian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Cameroon Pidgin English with their corresponding regional standards (Ghanaian English, Nigerian English, and Cameroon English). They find that the structural features of WAPEs and WAEs correspond quite closely, especially in phonology, less so in lexis.…”

“…11Peter and Wolf (: 6) attribute the close linguistic similarity (in both pronunciation and grammar) between Nigerian Pidgin English and CPE to the fact that they share a common (linguistic) history of forty years of joint administration (Huber : 57, 119–29; Holm : 410–12), and that their geographical proximity allows for cross‐border interchange between Pidgin speakers from Nigeria and Cameroon. Furthermore, Peter and Wolf () claim that at the time there were an estimated three million Nigerians living in Cameroon, a number which is sure to be much higher presently.…”