2024/07/23 by Kofi Yakpo · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies #Multilingual Education and Policy #Second Language Learning and Teaching
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/00020397241263364
openalex publication_date 2024/07/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
West African Pidgin (“Pidgin”) is a cluster of related, mutually intelligible, restructured Englishes with up to 140 million speakers in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, and The Gambia. Spoken by just few thousand people two centuries ago, “modernisation” and “shallow social entrenchment” have driven the transformation of Pidgin into a “super-central” world language. Demographic growth, migration, the expansion of West African cultural industries and economies, and people-to-people contacts are likely to expand Pidgin further. Already the largest language of West Africa, Pidgin may be spoken by 400 million people by 2100. The rise of Pidgin goes against the grain. World languages like English, French, Chinese, or Arabic mostly spread through colonisation, elite engineering, and state intervention. The trajectory of Pidgin, therefore, holds great potential for exploring the dynamics of large-scale natural language evolution in the twenty-first century.