![]() Therefore, pidgins can’t express high-minded thought-processes and are usually not anybody’s primary or first language. This is because they emerged as “emergency” languages for casual, short-term linguistic encounters. ![]() Īdditionally, pidgins are characterized by a simple, often anarchic and rudimentary grammatical structure, a severely limited vocabulary, and are used for the expression of really basic thought-processes. Examples: “Abeg come here quick quick, “The omoge fine well well”, “Di ting deyyanfuyanfu”, “Di kontri don jagajaga”. E.g., “Honestly” in “Honestly, this doesn’t make sense to me,” “really” in “I’m really tired.”Īnother structural characteristic in Nigerian Pidgin English, which is derived from indigenous Nigerian languages, is “reduplication.” Linguists use this term to describe the deliberate repetition of a word to create plurals or for emphasis. With a few exceptions, intensifiers appear either at the beginning or in the middle of sentences in English. Words like “o” in “E don taya me o,”, “na” in “wia you deyna?”, and “sha” in “Di ting get as e be sha” are terminal intensifiers because they appear at the end of sentences and merely heighten the meanings of the phrases that preceded them. An intensifier is a word that has little meaning except to accentuate the meaning of the word or phrase it modifies.Ī “terminal intensifier” is therefore an intensifier that appears at the end of a sentence. In African languages, it is usual to end sentences with what grammarians call terminal intensifiers. Let me give just one example to illustrate this. In the above sentence, the vocabulary is mostly English but the structure of the sentence is decidedly African. Look at this Nigerian Pidgin English sentence, for example: “Wetindeyhapunnau?” The informal Standard English equivalent of this expression would be “What’s up?” Now, “wetin” is a distortion of “what is,” “hapun” is the corruption of “happen,” but “nau” is derived from the Igbo word “na” or “nna.” In this linguistic fusion, the European languages provide most of the vocabulary and the indigenous languages provide the structure of the language. Pidgin, on the other hand, is a technical term in linguistics that refers to a “contact” or “trade” language that emerged from the fusion of foreign (usually European) languages and indigenous (usually non-European) languages.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |