I totally agree with Tola. I also like to encourage inventions. I remember one of my invented words in which I tried to describe a seven year old girl without breasts yet. I described her as a ‘breastless girl’ …who knows if our inventions might be added to the dictionary in years to come.

This Nigerian thing adds to our Nigerianess. Even in our writing, there is this flavour that you smell and almost immediately, you can say this is a Nigerian. However, i like it when you make the invented word comprehensible by a non-Nigerian. I mean, my friend in Durban shouldn’t have a proablem understanding why “soaking garri” doesnt mean you want to wash anything…i simply want to feed myself.

I made a reference when I posted two of my works written in ‘creole’, a heated debate on Facebook about the piginalisation of Nigerian Literature. I wish to take some of the things I said there: “I agree that pidgin is not a language, it is a bastardiser, a rebellion, a resistance, a corruptor of the rules governing languages. So, it is a fact that there is pidgin in the languages of the world. Apart from the fact that it is a matter of choice to speak pidgin, it is also naturally attractive to infuse pidgin in our everyday speech, even sometimes without knowing it. There is a saying that it is easier to destroy than to create, and that is true in every sense.

For instance, the correct expression: “What are you saying?” becomes “What are you talking?” or “What are you speaking?” in what I have decided to call Nigerian English. Would you conveniently say that Nigerian English is the pidgin, or is it the English conditioned to suit the Nigerian soil without ever breaking the rules that govern the English language? It would be erroneous of me to use the instance above to start drawing conclusions here. I could say that Nigerian English is the English that accommodates other expressions from Nigerian languages.

I believe that pidgin greatly affected only the morphology of languages, but I wouldn’t say that mindless affixing of words gave rise to pidgin, no way! Let us briefly analyse the contemporary Nigerian music scene that is full of hip-hop, reggae and R&B, or the mix of these three genres: If you pay attention closely, a great majority of the lyrics is expressed in pure pidgin, and the highly attentive audience of this music scene is the younger, upcoming generation of Nigerians. They “break their bodies” and go crazy to this music. And, funny enough, this sort of music is a source of identity for some of those musicians who sing it. Please tell me that any of you here are not guilty of being listeners of this music because I admit that I am due to the fact that my little ones at home sing to it, watch it on TV, listen to it over the radio or buy it.

Look at the government “public” primary schools and kindergartens. Even if there are qualified teachers or otherwise for those kids, should pidgin be the source of communication between them? This shows the ineptitude and uncaring nature those at the helm of government affairs on education matters have towards the future of these children. For sure, those children did not have the same privileges as most of us here when we were kids. But I stress here that those privileges can be got through a re-orientation and concrete re-emphasis on moral values. The problems with Nigerians generally are primarily and centrally attitudinal in nature, with ethnicity and religion following suit, making economic and socio-political problems secondary, in the postmodernist world we live in, as I was rightly told. GBAM!”

Would be correct to say that pidgin English in Nigeria is adjacent to the coined expression ‘Nigerian English’, as I have defined? At some point, one cannot but separate the two. There’s an obvious enrichment of that primary language English, and there is a need for lexicographers to be on hand to update the most looked-at dictionaries for new words brought about by those countries the English people ‘conquered’ during their historical voyages, hm, not just Nigeria and Africa.

Mastress, pigeon English is a language, maybe not an official language. But it surely is a language. Most people identify with with Nigerian songs because of the beats oh, not exactly the lyrics. You’ll agree with me that most people who listen to country songs will probably know the whole story of the song because they listen because of the lyrics. Ask yourself, is the story of ‘Do Me I Do You’ by Psquare as clear as perhaps their ‘Say Your Love’. Hmmm?

Pidgin is the new face of Nigeria… Call it a brand and u wont b wrong.

Nigerian English is now been looked into by various professors in Nigeria.It is not in any form substandard,it is a variety of world English.
Just as we have scottish Englis,Canadian English,American English,Nigerian English exist to express our peculiar culture,tradition and world view which the native speakers cannot express.that is why words like ‘agbada’,'waist bead’ abound in our lexicon.meanwhile pigeon english is regarded as a variety that cuts across social stratem usually spoken by both the educated and non educated.

@TolaO, as long as the English people came to Nigeria and gave us this ‘English’ that we speak today and for the rest of our lives, the rules of the English grammar is circumvented a bit as soon as it hits Nigerian soil. Pidgin English in Nigeria (‘pigeon’ according to @Jaywriter) is a ‘perverter’ [if there could be pidgin French in those francophone African countries], for there is also Pidgin Igbo, Pidgin Hausa and Pidgin Yoruba, as well as Pidgin Urhobo, Pidgin Isoko, even Pidgin Oron, Pidgin Efik, Pidgin Annang and pidgin in all the languages of the minority tribes in Nigeria. Yes, there is a beauty in pidgin, and that’s why I’m an advocate of pidgin, but I can’t allow pidgin to be my lingua franca at all! Mba!