It means, ‘Are you sure of what you are saying? This doesn’t seem true.’ E be like film The situation or topic is either suspicious or untrue.įor instance, one could say: ‘You sure of dis tin wey you dey talk so? Dis matter get k-leg.’ You can also say 'Dis food sweet no be small.' K-leg This phrase means 'This meal is delicious'. When you hear, 'You don chop up?' the speaker means 'You are prospering or have put on some weight.' Dis food sweet well, well To show that you are extremely hungry, you can say: So 'I wan Chop' or 'I dey H' means 'I want to eat' or 'I am hungry.' Unlike the English word, 'chop' which implies that something is being sliced or hacked in pidgin it means 'food'. This is pidgin for 'How are you?' With friends, you can also say: It doesn't threaten any linguistic or cultural heritage, but rather binds us. Our safe place is Nigerian Pidgin: our common language. This can make speakers of other languages uncomfortable. Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages are our national languages because they are spoken by the majority. Consequently, my siblings also learned languages and married speakers of other languages. My father also moved our family around by working in different states, until he settled in Abuja when I was born. My aunties married and introduced new languages into the family. This exposed them to different linguistic environments now they speak between three and six languages. My maternal grandfather, Sergeant Afa, was a soldier whose family of 11 moved from barrack to barrack. It is the one language that binds us all. Just remember to add a little bit of pidgin to yours and you will be fine. If you are visiting Nigeria, don't be daunted by the 520 languages in our repertoire. We may already have more than a million words at our disposal but around 1,000 new words make it into print every year, which just goes to show you can never have too much of a good thing! Let me know the ‘foreign’ words you couldn’t live without by commenting below and get in touch if you’d like help with your copywriting (sadly, in English only).Author Mimi Werna has put together her 20 favourite phrases in Nigerian Pidgin. And how would we manage without schadenfreude – the word with no direct English translation that means to derive pleasure from another’s misfortune? Take these commonly used examples: cul de sac (French), kowtow (Chinese), tsunami (Japanese), aficionado (Spanish), fest (German for celebration) and intelligentsia (Russian), all of which appear in the dictionary. Over time, we gradually absorb words once considered “foreign” and adopt them as our own. In fact, language experts estimate the English language contains “loanwords” taken from at least 350 languages. This is part of a well-established trend in which English is enriched by ‘borrowing’ from other languages. Notes accompanying the new dictionary explain, “By taking ownership of English and using it as their own medium of expression, Nigerians have made, and are continuing to make a unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language.” It’s nothing new Qualitative – meaning excellent quality.Mama put – a woman who runs a food stall.Ember months – the busy period from September to December.Barbing salon – as you may have guessed, a barber’s shop.And to confer, they “rub minds”.Īs for the Yoruba name “Tokunbo”, this was originally the term given to a child born abroad but its use has been widened to include a wide range of imported items from cars to clothes and it’s now listed as an adjective! Ask a Nigerian what corrupt politicians do with state cash and you may hear that they’ll “chop it”, meaning steal it. When Nigerians say “see you next tomorrow” they mean the day after tomorrow. Crash courseįor those who haven’t grown up with the language, here’s a quick crash course: It’s no surprise that this common language has thrived in a country of 190 million in which more than 500 languages are spoken. The rapid rise of Nigerian pop culture with Afrobeat, a flourishing ‘Nollywood’ film industry and popular fiction by the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have brought Pidgin English – a mix of English, words from local languages and street slang – to a wider audience. Now, their unique brand of Pidgin English has gone mainstream with the announcement by the Oxford English Dictionary that it’s added 29 Nigerian colloquialisms to its latest edition. Nigerians have long taken English, the former colonial language, and made it their own.
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