BBC programmer Busayo Iruemiode checks the broadcaster's new Pidgin website in Lagos, Nigeria, on August 18, 2017 AMELIE QUERFURTH/AFP/Getty Images

How do you go about writing down a language that is almost entirely oral? For the staff of the BBC World Service's new Pidgin news site, it all started with listening. Lots of listening.

Despite being spoken by an estimated 75 million people in Nigeria alone – and as a first language for five million people – Pidgin has, until this week, been marginalised online. "In terms of its text life it lives pretty much on social media," says Miriam Quansah, BBC's digital lead for Africa.


To begin the process of converting a primarily oral language into an agreed written form, the World Service interacted with people across Africa who spoke it.

The team who built the service (some of whom can translate Shakespeare into Pidgin) travelled to west Africa to speak to young people, visit universities and consult professors and experts in the area to observe how they communicate.

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Quansah, who leads the digital aspect of the project, says standardisation is an evolving thing, reliant on audience feedback. "It’s a very interactive language and that was our approach; we know that everyone will have an opinion on the Pidgin we produce so we will ask speakers to tell us whether we are using certain words and phrases in the right way."

BBC


The service will bring language diversity to the news and current affairs that west and central African audiences receive, where Pidgin is one of the most widely-spoken languages.

Adverts, radio stations, films and music are already produced in Pidgin, but news organisations have traditionally shunned it.

West African Pidgin English was used as a simple trade language between Europeans and Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th centuries. It became a mix of English and local languages, which is why it's often offensively referred to as broken English.

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Despite its popularity, people speak Pidgin with varying levels of fluency. And, as it is not studied in schools, it doesn't exist in a standardised written form. Because Pidgin is seen as an informal language, there is sometimes a stigma around speaking it, which Quansah thinks the new service is helping to break.

"There is a stereotype in some parts of the continent about being honest that Pidgin is your first language; people prefer if you speak English. In Nigeria however, people are very proud of speaking Pidgin," says Quansah, whose own Ghanian mother was skeptical about the project. "West African parents don't see Pidgin as a serious language, so they were stunned to find out the BBC were doing this. They get it now that they see so many people consume and live this language."

The decision to make this a digital only service was based on the fact that African people prefer to read content on their mobile phones. "We have always wanted to be able to offer relevant content to a younger audience and to an audience that is under-represented in the media landscape across Africa," Quansah says. "Being digital only and using the languages we are now going into enables us to offer important news and current affairs to audiences we may not have reached before."

Although Pidgin is spoken in different forms across Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, there are a lot of words that unify them all. Quansah says the World Service team are "remarkably and pleasantly surprised" by the amount of text content they have been able to produce, but that BBC Pidgin’s long-term success will be in a visual form, including video and data journalism. "If we are telling stories that can touch an audience in Sierra Leone, Benin, Ghana or Nigeria then we are doing our jobs," she adds.

Pidgin will soon be joined by 11 more new services in Africa and Asia, as part of the World Service's biggest expansion since the 1940s, thanks to a 2016 funding boost from the UK government.


BBC Pidgin will provide a mix of local, regional and international news current affairs and analysis. The production hub is based in Lagos, the commercial capital, but reporters in Ghana, Cameroon and elsewhere in Nigeria will also be gathering local news.

Other new languages that will be offered by the BBC World Service include Korean, Gujarati, Telegu, Marathi and Punjabi for India and Amharic and Oromo for Ethiopia and Tigrinya for Eritrea.