Ghanaian Pidgin English

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that survived into the 20th century. Structurally, this early trade Pidgin English was considerably simpler and more variable than today's GhaPE. The first textual attestation comes from a Royal African Company trader's diary entry in 1686, reporting some 50 words of an Anomabu trader (Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS Rawlinson C745). The formation of GhaPE as current today took place during British colonial rule in West Africa. From the 1840s onwards, Africans liberated from slave ships by the British navy and settled on the Sierra Leone peninsula, some 1,500 km west of Ghana, went back to their respective places of origin, thus spreading an early form of Sierra Leonean Krio along the West African coast, Nigeria in particular. Historical and linguistic evidence indicates that in the 1920s migrant workers introduced the Nigerian offshoot of Krio to the Gold Coast, where it replaced the earlier trading pidgin (for more detailed information on the history of GhaPE see Huber 1999a, 1999b, 2004). 3. Sociolinguistic situation Twi, comprising the non-Fante dialects of Akan, is the main areal lingua franca in Ghana's south. GhaPE, locally known as Pidgin (English), Broken (English), and formerly as Kru English or kroo brofo (the Akan term), is a predominantly oral and urban phenomenon. It is spoken in the southern towns, especially in the capital Accra. GhaPE is confined to a smaller (though growing) section of society than Pidgin in other anglophone West African countries, probably because of the strong position of Twi as a lingua franca. Also, its functional domain is more restricted and the language is more stigmatized, although this situation is currently changing rapidly. Pidgin is not officially recognized as a language of Ghana and there is no standardized orthography. The few grammatical descriptions are purely scholarly works. There are two main GhaPE varieties. Basilectal GhaPE is associated with the less educated sections of society, while more mesolectal/acrolectal GhaPE (also called "Student Pidgin") is usually spoken by Ghanaians who have at least progressed to the upper forms of secondary school, if not to the universities. The basilectal GhaPE spoken in Nima, an immigrant quarter of the capital Accra, is the default lect documented in the APiCS database and described in this article. The difference between the two GhaPE varieties lies not so much in their linguistic structure (the main differences are lexical, but the two are largely mutually intelligible) as in the functions they serve. Basilectal GhaPE is used a lingua franca in highly multilingual contexts, e.g. in Accra's immigrant quarters Nima, Kanda, or Mamobi, which are characterized by a high degree of linguistic heterogeneity and a generally low educational attainment. The more acrolectal varieties, however, are better characterized as in-group languages whose main function is to express group solidarity rather than to fulfil basic communication needs, since Standard (Ghanaian) English is available to all parties in these settings and could be resorted to if no common indigenous language were at hand. Pidgin entered Ghanaian secondary schools around the mid-1960s and was soon carried into the universities, where it is today heard on campus, in students' bars, and the halls of residence. Pidgin has also made its way into the home, where it is now used mainly among brothers with 2
secondary education, often to the exclusion of the Ghanaian languages. Pre-school children of middle class families appear to pick up GhaPE from their fathers. Today, educated urban males under 50 years of age can be expected to switch to Pidgin in informal settings. The educated variety is currently spreading fast and is being used in more and more contexts. 4. Phonology Table 1. Vowels GhaPE has seven (or nine) monophthongal oral vowels (some speakers making length distinctions front central back between /i/-/iː/ and /u/-/uː/). Since all close i(ː) u(ː) monophthongs can be nasalized, the loss of a nasal close‐mid e o consonant after a nasalized vowel can lead to a open‐mid open ɛ a ɔ phonemic opposition between oral and nasal vowels, e.g. hapi 'happy' vs. hapĩ 'happen'. There are six diphthongs, /ai, au, ɔi, iɛ, ɛa, uɔ/. The last three occur only in sequences in words derived from the lexifier, e.g. beer, chair, and sure. /ɛa/ and /uɔ/ are often reduced to the monophthongs /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ as illustrated in ripɛ 'repair' or pɔ 'poor'. Table 2. Consonants bilabial labio‐ dental labio‐ velar alveolar post‐ alveolar palatal velar glottal plosive unvoiced p (k͡p) t k voiced b (g͡b) d g nasal m n (ɲ) ŋ trill [r] fricative unvoiced f s ʃ h voiced v z affricate unvoiced ʧ voiced ʤ approximant w j lateral approx. l [ɻ] Bracketed consonants only occur in ideophones or African loans. Like Ghanaian English, GhaPE is a non‐rhotic variety. The realization of non‐post‐vocalic /r/ as an approximant or a trill depends on the quality of the r‐sound in the speaker’s L1 (Akan has an r‐sound similar to that of English; Dolphyne 1988: 27‐29) and on the speaker’s phonetic competence. /v/ is not part of the Hausa or the Akan phoneme inventory (Dolphyne 1988: 29), so some of these speakers more or less consistently substitute it by /b/ or /f/ in GhaPE. [l] and [r] are in complementary distribution or free variation in the major Ghanaian substrate languages (e.g. Akan, Dolphyne 1988: 42‐43; Dangme, Apronti 1977: 132; Ewe, Schadeberg 1985: 9; Ga, Kropp Dakubu 1977: 250; Dagbani, Wilson 1977: 123; Dagarti, Hall 1977: 114), and they may be used interchangeably on the lower end of the GhaPE continuum, especially by older speakers who had little formal education. The realization of /ʧ, ʤ/ also varies 3
Page 1: Ghanaian Pidgin English Magnus Hube
Page 5 and 6: Table 3. Pronouns subject object ad
Page 7 and 8: (15) ì bikam wail laik taiga. 3SG
Page 9 and 10: Ingressive aspect can be expressed
Page 11 and 12: Negative attraction (in which the v
Page 13 and 14: Such noun + pronoun constructions a
Page 15 and 16: (65) à tɛl jù (se) rod no de dɛ
Page 17: Huber, Magnus. 1999b. ʺAtlantic En

Ghanaian Pidgin English

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