Nigerian Pidgin

A comparison of the varieties of West African Pidgin English

“…Berry, 1971; Njeuma, 1995; Huber, 1999), and no doubt major works on the national varieties of WAPE exist. Most notably, one can mention Huber (1999) on Ghanaian Pidgin English (GhaPE), Elugbe and Omamor (1991) and Faraclas (1996) on Nigerian Pidgin English (NigPE), and Mbassi‐Manga (1973) and de Féral (1989) on Cameroon Pidgin English (CamPE) 1 . Although these studies provide a detailed account of the structure of each variety in question, only Huber has attempted to contrast some “diagnostic features” of the different varieties of English‐based pidgins and creoles in West Africa (in Huber, 1999) and has recently published (Huber, 2004a, b) a shorter description of GhaPE in comparison with NigPE in particular 2 .…”

“…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.…”

“…This feature occurs in NigPE and CamPE, but the literature differs on the frequency of occurrence in NigPE. Mafeni (1971: 110) considers d ɛ m to be the only plural marker in this variety, and Faraclas (1996: 168) “the most commonly utilized means to show plurality in nouns”. Tagliamonte, Poplack, and Eze (1997), though, found that d ɛ m is used in less than 1% of their data, and that the English affix ‐ s is the most commonly used plural marker.…”

“…The function of d ɛ m , however, is to establish a reference to more than one entity of a class denoted by the noun. As Elugbe and Omamor (1991: 98) state, d ɛ m “occurs after the noun head which is itself preceded by the definite article di ‘the’ or the demonstratives dis ‘this’ and dat ‘that’” (their italics; also see the confusing description in Faraclas, 1996: 234). It is because of the deictic character of these words that they describe them as having “definite reference”, or, consistent with the short introduction to the subchapter above, non‐generic reference.…”

“…We have been informed, however, that Bororo (Fulani) people living in pidgin‐speaking areas and using CamPE as a lingua franca tend to use it ( mi no g ti milik ‘I don't have milk’). Elugbe and Omamor (1991: 90) do not list mi as a subject pronoun for NigPE, and Faraclas (1996: 176, 179) argues that mi as a subject pronoun cannot normally be “found in non‐contrastive non‐emphatic contexts”. Yet while mi does occur in contrastive contexts as the subject pronoun together with a in NigPE, we also observed the frequent use of mi in non‐contrastive and non‐emphatic contexts.…”