I must have read thousands of BBC articles over the years and never ran across this before. Pretty cool.
I did a search before posting this and I got more hits of posters spelling pigeon wrong than about the language.
Even the cookie opt-in is in pidgin (should that be capitalized?).
No, it should not be capitalized. “pidgin” is a broadly used term. There is no “one true pidgin” for English… There are hundreds of them. The idea of a website having “a” pidgin is ridiculous. A person speaking another pidgin English might find that quite incomprehensible.
There is a type of language called a “pidgin” and if you’re stating a particular language is a pidgin language then no, because it’s an adjective. Just as you wouldn’t capitalize “creole” if you said a particular language was a creole.
If, however, you are referring to a specific pidgin language then yes, you probably should capitalize it just as you would capitalize French or German or Japanese.
There are a lot of pidgins - here’s a list from Wikipedia.. Note that specific pidgins are capitalized, like West Greenlandic Pidgin or Nigerian Pidgin, but it’s a bit spotty regarding capitalization for others on the list. I’m guessing it depends on whether “pidgin” is part of the language’s name or an adjective modifying the name. And the entry “English-based pidgins” does not capitalize pidgin, presumably because it’s not referring to one specific language.
I myself was going to ask which pidgin it was. I had to jump to Google to find that it is “West African Pidgin English, also called Guinea Coast Creole English.”
And I note that the BBC themselves do capitalize the word “Pidgin” when referring to this specific variety.
Well… technically, if it’s actually a creole then it’s not pidgin. But it wouldn’t surprise me that there are creoles that are called pidgins, because most of them started as pidgins (then later acquired native speaker who further refined it).
That’s really cool!
Since it specifically separates Nigeria from the rest of Africa, I assumed that’s the specific pidgin being used.
Announcement from 2017:
Pidgin is spoken by an estimated 75m people in Nigeria alone, with additional speakers across West and Central Africa.
I grew up in Freetown, West Africa. My sister and I were both fairly fluent in the local pidgin. Our mother disapproved.
Did you retain any of it or is it a struggle for you to comprehend it now?
I run across a few different versions in NY and I’m often surprised how much I can understand. I actually have to do a little pause to mentally switch over, unlike daily users. There are also immigrants who have their local pidgin, but start adding American English to it so it seems to constantly evolve.
I have no background in pidgin and have no problem comprehending it. Speaking it on the other hand…