It keeps changing all the time, and it’s expressive as well.” That is why it is easy for a Yoruba native speaker who speaks pidgin to make syntactic construction such as “my heart dey do gbimgbim” which translates into “my heart beats fast”. As Bilikisu Labaran, the head of the new BBC Pidgin, puts it, “It is quite fluid. That is, it is unstable and likely to change often. However, they are usually mutually intelligible.

There are differences in these varieties in each, the English language is mixed with other languages in the country. For instance, in Nigeria, there is the Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) which has its peculiar features when compared with the pidgin spoken in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Cameroon. Right from its birth, the West African Pidgin English has experienced considerable growth, and there are even offshoots of it based on region. Afterwards, the British slave merchants dominated the slave trade, and consequently, they (the British) and the local African traders developed and improved the language to facilitate their commercial activities. The remnant of some words which are of Portuguese origin in today’s West-African pidgin English includes “sabi” (to know) and “pikin” (child).

History has it that Portuguese traders were the first set of Europeans to trade in West Africa in the 15th century. The West African Pidgin English was a language of commerce between British and African slave traders during the Atlantic slave trade around the 17th and 18th centuries. It is the root of many other interesting phenomena, including the advent of pidgin and creole-a pidgin that has grown into having native speakers. Language contact is an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Pidgin, this new form, usually composed of basic elements of two or more languages, arises from language contact and can be built from words, sounds, or body language. by Peter Stockwell.When two people with different native languages meet, and there is the need for them to communicate, they might be forced to express themselves in a thwarted form of their languages which over time can give rise to a new form of language. Trask, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed., ed. The result is a creole, and the children who create it are the first native speakers of the creole.' (R.L. This happens when the children in a community have nothing but a pidgin to use with other children, in which case the children take the pidgin and turn it into a real language, by fixing and elaborating the grammar and greatly expanding the vocabulary. Third, and most dramatically, it can be turned into a mother tongue. Second, it can remain in use for generations, or even centuries, as has happened with some west African pidgins. This has happened to Hawaiian pidgin, now almost entirely displaced by English, the prestige language of Hawaii. First, it may eventually drop out of use. 'There are several possible fates for a pidgin.What we know about the history and origins of existing creoles suggests that this may happen at any stage in the development of a pidgin.' (Mark Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. 'A creole comes into being when children are born into a pidgin-speaking environment and acquire the pidgin as a first language.Most pidgins are structurally simple, although if used over many generations, they do evolve, as do all languages (Aitchison, 1983 Sankoff & Laberge, 1973).' (Erika Hoff, Language Development, 5th ed., Wadsworth, 2014)

'ore than 100 pidgin languages are currently in use (Romaine, 1988).pidgin languages survive today in territories which formerly belonged to the European colonial nations, and act as lingua francas for example, West African Pidgin English is used extensively between several ethnic groups along the West African coast.' (David Crystal, English As a Global Language. In time, most pidgin languages disappear, as the pidgin-speaking community develops, and one of its established languages becomes widely known and takes over the role of the pidgin as the lingua franca, or language of choice of those who do not share a native language.' (Grover Hudson, Essential Introductory Linguistics. 'At first a pidgin language has no native speakers and is used just for doing business with others with whom one shares the pidgin language and no other.

Pidgin language