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Pidgin To Become A Formal Language

Posted by 9jabook.com on September 23, 2010 at 4:11am
Brimming with life, playful and illustrative, Nigerian Pidgin English lends itself well to creativity, evolving quickly and readily borrowing from current events. A World Cup blunder by Nigerian player Sani Kaita briefly spawned the word "Kaitalistic" to mean catastrophic and the frequent acts of kidnapping in Nigeria has popularized the term "Colombia people" to describe the perpetrators on Nigeria's first pidgin station Wazobia 95.1 FM. "American Presido say time don reach to comot im troop for Iraq," announced the newscaster on a recent lunchtime bulletin, after U.S. President Barack Obama announced a formal end to the U.S. military's combat mission in Iraq last month. Nigerian Afrobeat music pioneer Fela Kuti was a major proponent of Pidgin, further popularizing its use with albums like "Why Black Man Dey Suffer" and "I Go Shout Plenty". "Good English (could) not convey the message of African music," he was quoted as saying in one of his biographies. Despite the popularity of Pidgin, the Akademi faces an uphill struggle convincing all Nigerians, many of whom see it as a by-product of the country's falling education standards. "Pidgin looks like a bastardization of the English language," said Reuben Abati, chairman of the editorial board for Nigeria's Guardian newspapers and a respected columnist. "The West African elite, who see it as the language of commoners, like to dissociate themselves from Pidgin. They want their children to sound like Upper Class Britons. That attitude is wrong because it has to do with identity. As second users of the language, we must promote varieties of Englis
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