This is because they emerged as “emergency” languages for casual, short-term linguistic encounters. This mimics such words as maza maza in Hausa, kia kia in Yoruba, etc.Īdditionally, pidgins are characterized by a simple, often anarchic and rudimentary grammatical structure, a severely limited vocabulary, and are used for the expression of really basic thought-processes. Examples: "Abeg come here quick quick, "The omoge fine well well", "Di ting dey yanfu yanfu", "Di kontri don jaga jaga". E.g., “Honestly” in “Honestly, this doesn’t make sense to me,” “really” in “I’m really tired.”Īnother structural characteristic of Nigerian Pidgin English, which is derived from indigenous Nigerian languages, is "reduplication." Linguists use this term to describe the deliberate repetition of a word to create plurals or for emphasis. With a few exceptions, intensifiers appear either at the beginning or in the middle of sentences in English.
Words like “o” in “E don taya me o,”, “na” in “wia you dey na?”, and “sha” in “Di ting get as e be sha” are terminal intensifiers because they appear at the end of sentences and merely heighten the meanings of the phrases that preceded them. An intensifier is a word that has little meaning except to accentuate the meaning of the word or phrase it modifies.Ī “terminal intensifier” is therefore an intensifier that appears at the end of a sentence. In African languages, it is usual to end sentences with what grammarians call terminal intensifiers. Let me give just one example to illustrate this. In the above sentence, the vocabulary is mostly English but the structure of the sentence is decidedly African. Look at this Nigerian Pidgin English sentence, for example: “Wetin dey hapun nau?” The informal Standard English equivalent of this expression would be “What’s up?” Now, “wetin” is a distortion of “what is,” “hapun” is the corruption of “happen,” but “nau” is derived from the Igbo word “na” or “nna.” In this linguistic fusion, the European languages provide most of the vocabulary and the indigenous languages provide the structure of the language. Pidgin, on the other hand, is a technical term in linguistics that refers to a “contact” or “trade” language that emerged from the fusion of foreign (usually European) languages and indigenous (usually non-European) languages. Now, since even native English speakers routinely violate the rules of their own language, tolerable grammatical errors can’t be regarded as “broken English.”
It should be noted, though, that uneducated or barely educated people in English-as-a-second-language linguistic environments can- and indeed do- speak or write broken English, while people who are well-schooled in English in English-as-a-foreign-language environments don’t speak or write broken English. Chinese and Japanese people) rather than people for whom it is a second language (e.g. “I will see you tomorrow” could become “Me is come see you tomorrow.” And so on.Īs it should be obvious by now, the people who are apt to speak or write broken English in the classical conception of the term are often people for whom English is a foreign language (e.g. Two other popular names for broken English are “halting English” and “faltering English.” For instance, the sentence, “I want to see you” may be rendered as “me like see you” in broken English. And my short answer is no, although there are occasional overlaps between Nigerian Pidgin English and Nigerian English.īut, first, what is “broken English”? Well, it is a somewhat pejorative label used by native speakers of English to describe the often hysterical violations of the basic rules of Standard English syntax by non-native speakers of the language. Is Nigerian English the same as (Nigerian) Pidgin English or, for that matter, “broken English”? I have been asked this question many times.
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