Talk:West African Pidgin English

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 September 2018 and 31 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): IsabelRMcn.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:50, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Expansion needed

The discussion does not mention the influence of Portuguese that contributed words such as "sabi" (from "saber", to know) and "pikin" (meaning child, from "pequeno", small). It also ignores contributions from African languages.

New BBC language service: Pidgin

Pidgin, "a creole version of English widely spoken in southern Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea", will be included in a recently announced expansion by the BBC. Are there any WP articles in West African Pidgin? That'd be great! It will be interesting to see how easy translations from English would be. In other words, how much English is recognizable by non-speakers? McortNGHH (talk) 21:18, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Reading this article I - as a non-expert - get the definite impression it covers a historical non-contemporary subject. I therefore think it is not an appropriate target for the BBC News factoid. Instead I added it to Nigerian Pidgin. Feel free to rearrange if you know more about the subject. CapnZapp (talk) 22:07, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Question on citation or deletion

My student @IsabelRMcn: has been working on this article for our ANTH 474 course included a citation for a piece of information on this page, but realized that it is an almost word for word copy of the original article. She wrote this in her edit summary - "found the citation used for this section and noticed that is was copied almost word for word, and not academic. Also noticed while looking at the magazine article that this may be better suited in the Jamaican Maroons page. Please let me know if I should delete it." Following up to make sure others see this and can comment - FYI @Elysia (Wiki Ed): Thanks! CESchreyer (talk) 05:37, 13 November 2018 (UTC)CESchreyer

@IsabelRMcn and CESchreyer: thanks for pointing that out! The copyvio tool [1] shows substantial copyright infringement! Please feel free to remove it without reservations! Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:56, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! We deleted it. CESchreyer (talk) 01:49, 14 November 2018 (UTC)CESchreyer

Family or language?

Would it be more accurate to define West African Pidgin English as a family (or even dialect continuum) of creole languages? Glottolog describes it as a family within the Guinea Coast Creole English family,. Even this page links to varieties of West African Pidgin English that are referred to as languages in their own right on each of their respective pages. I didn't want to change this without input, but I wanted to know what the consensus was. Noahfgodard (talk) 04:53, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

References

structure section: many errors, no refs

The structure section doesn't have a single citation, and a lot of it is either conjecture or completely false.

Here are some quick corrections to more or less the entire thing:

"the speech of Britain's educated classes": Britain doesn't have just one standard or prestigious dialect; the "Queen's English" is RP but only 2% of British people speak it so I'm not sure what the point of this statement is

"the Nautical English spoken by the British sailors who manned the slave ships that sailed to Africa as part of the triangular trade": There's no such thing as Nautical English. It's not even an informal, colloquial term—every profession or isolated group picks up their own way of communicating amongst themselves, but it's not a special ocean boat language. They were probably from Birmingham, Liverpool, other impoverished areas where unemployed men needed work. They have incredibly different dialects that even Americans can tell the difference between, but they *are* all stigmatized within Britain.

"Evidence of this early nautical speech can still be found in the modern pidgin and creole languages derived from West African Pidgin English." This author doesn't know what pidgins or creoles are. Modern languages that organically evolved from another language are just regular languages; a pidgin is basically a lingua franca, so the speakers don't actually speak each other's language. Also, evidence of whatever dialect he's talking about would exist in the British dialect itself and/or its descendants (eg Birmingham accents don't sound that different from when Peaky Blinders were around). If the author meant that you can still see traces of a pidgin's lexifier (ie English) in the pidgin... Lexifiers supply most of the lexicon to the pidgin. So since the languages entire vocabulary comes from english, there's pretty obviously some "evidence" of it. That's like saying Modern English has traces of Middle English—it's redundant.

"In Sierra Leone Krio,": Krio/Creo is its own language completely separate from this one. There's a theory that they share roots, but that's still very much a theory, and even the Wikipedia page for Krio says "The pidgin gradually evolved to become a stable language, the native language of descendants of the freed slaves (which are now a distinct ethnic and cultural group, the Creoles)," which is correct and also has an actual citation.

"Krio words derived from English regional dialects include..." Deeply irresponsible to assert this without any source. I searched the text of multiple dictionaries of Krio including Ethnologue and the official Peace Corps manual and none of these came up. Also, again, these examples should be from West African Pidgin English—NOT some other related language that has its own page. LaymansLinguist (talk) 14:03, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Krio is NOT a derivative of West African Pidgin

Frankly I don't believe the Krio language of the Sierra Leone Creoles derives from West African Pidgin. There are several sources in the literature indicating that the Krio language derived from Jamaican Maroon Creole, African American Vernacular English, Gullah, Igbo and Yoruba. Most of this article comes across as original research with an amateurish flavor. As a native Krio speaker, I know that while all English-based creole languages are intelligible to me, I have noticed that speakers of West African Pidgin languages generally do not understand us unless we incorporate a huge dose of English words in our speech. They do understand each other however in undiluted doses - meaning a Ghanaian can speak his pidgin to a Nigerian without thinking about it. While this is no proof of a difference in origin, it at least points to a need for serious research in this area of study. It is not enough to simply dump all pidgins/creoles in the same category simply because they all share the same geographic subregion. Aku and Pichinglis are also derivatives of Krio and should not be listed here. Krio is a full-blown creole language accompanied by a Creole ethnicity. It is not just a linguistic phenomenon, it is anthropological. Inamo11 (talk) 20:21, 24 December 2022 (UTC)