West African Pidgin: a world language against the grain

Abstract

West African Pidgin ("Pidgin") and Krio constitute a group of restructured varieties of English, numbering up to 140 million speakers in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea and the Gambia. Spoken by just a few thousand people two centuries ago, "modernization" and "shallow social roots" (Yakpo, 2021) have led to Pidgin's transformation into a global language "super-central" (de Swaan, 2001), centered on West Africa. Population growth, migration, the expansion of West African cultural industries and economies, and people-to-people contacts are likely to further develop Pidgin. Already the largest language in West Africa, Pidgin could be spoken by 400 million people by 2100. The rise of Pidgin goes against the grain. World languages such as English, French, Chinese and Arabic have spread mainly through colonization, elite linguistic engineering and administrative intervention. The trajectory of Pidgin therefore offers great potential for exploring the changing dynamics of "natural linguistic evolution" (Mufwene, 2015) and self-organized, typical of creolization.

Kofi Yakpo

Kofi Yakpo is Associate Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the linguistic and social forces influencing the evolution of languages in multilingual societies, particularly in Africa and the African and Asian diasporas of the Caribbean. He has published over a hundred works, spanning linguistics, politics, music, and creative writing. He was awarded a Labex EFL International Chair hosted by CNRS and LLACAN in 2022 and was the recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2020. His field research courses to African and Asian countries have become references for experiential learning at the University of Hong Kong.