My first encounter with pidgin English was through a new student in my senior secondary school whose father had been transferred from Delta state to Ogun state, where the school was located, for work. She and the guys in the class blended faster than the girls for obvious reasons as she could relate with them in their own language, pidgin English. I heard her speak it and instantly, I wanted to learn it.
Fast forward to nine years later, I can speak pidgin English to a good extent and I am fine with that. It definitely helps my communication skills with all sorts of people. And now, I know someone who thinks that people who speak pidgin English are uncivilized, relatively uneducated, without any class and in other words, razz, as Nigerians qualify such people. Of course, I differed with that school of thought as for one, I was not uncivilized, uneducated or without class, and also, I knew of people in the upper economic class who were very versed in the English language, heck they studied abroad, so I mean, there you go and they were definitely not razz. I understand that people from the South South in Nigeria – Benin, Delta, Calabar, Bayelsa -have a different flavour in their kind of pidgin English, which is said to be the ‘original’ pidgin English as all others are supposedly ‘Lagos pidgin’ but people mostly qualify that “waffy” pidgin English to be the “razz” one.
Just like me, a lot of people speak pidgin English to communicate better with other social classes of people who provide services e.g conductors, meet some need or the other e.g the Hausa ‘mallams’ who sell wares in kiosks, or just for friendship and acquaintance purposes. It’s like knowing how to speak the language of a different tribe, which is just added street knowledge, and it definitely helps with relating better with the people in that environment.
So I wouldn’t say that speaking pidgin English in any way makes one razz or anything along those lines. It just makes one comfortable with most kinds of people as the language, though not a lingua franca, is widely spoken and understood by the listening party. I happen to find people who can turn on and turn off the pidgin vibe to be street smart in a unique way so no dear, I don’t agree that speaking pidgin English makes anyone razz. And if it does, well, that’s exactly what I am.
Article by Soomto Ajanma
