Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context

A sociohistorical and structural analysis

Magnus Huber | University of Regensburg

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027248824 (Eur) | EUR 120.00

ISBN 9781556197222 (USA) | USD 180.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027272966 | EUR 120.00 | USD 180.00

This first published full-scale study of the Ghanaian variety of West African Pidgin English (GhaPE) makes extensive use of hitherto neglected historical material and provides a synchronic account of GhaPEs structure and sociolinguistics. Special focus is on the differences between GhaPE and other West African Pidgins, in particular the development of, and interrelations between, the different varieties of restructured English in West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. This monograph further includes an overview of the history of Afro-European contact languages in Lower Guinea with special emphasis on the Gold Coast; an outline of the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone, with a description of how and when the transplantation of Sierra Leonean Krio to other West African countries took place; an analysis of the linguistic evidence for the origin, development, and spread of restructured Englishes on the Lower Guinea Coast; an account of the different varieties of GhaPE and their sociolinguistic status in the contemporary linguistic ecology of Ghana; as well as a comprehensive structural description of the “uneducated” variety of GhaPE. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM which contains illustrative material such as spoken GhaPE and photographs.

[Varieties of English Around the World, G24] 1999. xviii, 322 pp. (incl. CD-Rom)

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g24

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | p. xi

Abbreviations | p. xiii

Maps | p. xv

Introduction | p. 1

A sociohistorical account of Pidgins on the Gold Coast | p. 9

Excursus: The settlement of the Sierra Leone peninsula, 1787–1850 | p. 59

The origin and development of West African Pidgin Englishes: linguistic data | p. 75

The sociolinguistics of Ghanaian Pidgin English | p. 135

A synchronic-structural description of Ghanaian Pidgin English | p. 165

Conclusion | p. 253

Appendices | p. 257

Index | p. 305

The CD: system requirements | p. 319

“The book under review is an exemplary study which combines a comprehensive awareness of the current state of research, innovative analyses of newly discovered material, scholarly precision, and eminent readability. The book is superbly edited and printed, and such construes a most welcome addition to the diachronic and synchronic descriptions of coastal West African languages.”

Manfred Görlach, University of Cologne in Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 16:2. 2001

“Huber's book is an impressive achievement, a substantial contribution to the study of West African varieties of restructured English.”

Andrei A. Avram, University of Bucharest in Language and Society 32:2, 2003

“Huber's grammatical sketch provides necessary documentation of this otherwise neglected English-based pidgin. As with his presentation of the historical context and genesis of West African pidgins, Huber clearly points out where and why his syntactic description deviates from other accounts. Beyond the merits of the content of Huber's work, Huber is to be recommended for the transparency of methods -through the inclusion of the CD-ROM, as well as the style of his written presentation. While sharing primary data sources in this way may leave Huber's work open to more criticism, this work presents an exemplary case of methodological decisions that all researches are faced with.”

Tristan Michael Purvis, Indiana University, in Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48.1/2, 2003

“Huber's book is in my view a well-researched book and an example to those who do research on the history of contanct languages. It is a valuable study, not only because it is the first major study on GPE, but also because it is the result of a fruitful combination of the use of early sources on language contact, historical data about migrations and demographic changes, linguistic fieldwork, and text collection. An additional value is added by the inclusion of the CD-ROM.”

Peter Bakker, Aarhus University, in The Carrier Pidgin, Vol. 30: 1-3.

“This work deserves the widest possible readership and has much to offer to anyone interested in contact linguistics, descrilptive linguistics, sociolinguistics, English language studiesand Pidgin and Creole studies.”

Thomas B. Klein in Journal of Linguistics 37, 2001

Cited by (84)

Cited by 84 other publications

Order by:

Ansah, Gladys Nyarko

2024. Cultural conceptualisations and spatial cognition in Ghanaian English. World Englishes 43:3 ► pp. 379 ff.

Chen, Pin-Hsi Patrick, Kwaku Owusu Afriyie Osei-Tutu & Neda Taherkhani

2023. A cross-linguistic syntactic analysis of telicity in motion predicates in Southern Tati, Mandarin, and Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Studies in Language 47:4 ► pp. 900 ff.

Oyebola, Folajimi & Kingsley Ugwuanyi

2023. Attitudes of Nigerians Towards BBC Pidgin: A Preliminary Study. Language Matters 54:1 ► pp. 78 ff.

Ajagbe, Samsondeen, Bridget Fonkeu & Uyi Edegbe

2022. West African Pidgin as a tool for socio-economic development. Language Problems and Language Planning 46:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Mazzoli, Maria

2021. The ideological debate on Naijá and its use in education. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 42:3 ► pp. 299 ff.

Danae Perez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek & Daniel Schreier

2021. English and Spanish,

Thompson, Rachel G. A., Jerry John Nutor & Julene K. Johnson

2021. Communicating Awareness About COVID-19 Through Songs: An Example From Ghana. Frontiers in Public Health 8

Caron, Bernard

2020. Methodological and technical challenges of a corpus-based study of Naija. In West African languages. Linguistic theory and communication,

FitzGerald, Sarah

2020. A corpus‐based method for identifying word class in an English lexified extended pidgin. World Englishes 39:2 ► pp. 348 ff.

Hampel, Elisabeth

2020. Regional variation in Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Sociolinguistic Studies 14:3

Hansen, Beke

2020. Localisation, Globalisation and Gender in Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Ghanaian English. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 23 ff.

Isiaka, Adeiza

2020. A Tale of Many Tongues: Towards Conceptualising Nigerian Youth Languages. Language Matters 51:2 ► pp. 68 ff.

Kempf, Viktoria

2020. „Long live our tribal jujus“- Das Bedeutungsspektrum des Begriffs juju im kamerunischen Englisch. Afrika und Übersee 93 ► pp. 202 ff.

Roberge, Paul T.

2020. Germanic Contact Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, ► pp. 833 ff.

Hackert, Stephanie

2019. The perfect in English-lexifier pidgins and creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 34:2 ► pp. 195 ff.

Hackert, Stephanie

2021. Creole Distinctiveness?. In English and Spanish, ► pp. 92 ff.

Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee

2019. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization,

Lim, Lisa

2019. The Contribution of Language Contact to the Emergence of World Englishes. In The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 72 ff.

van Rooy, Bertus

2019. English in Africa. In The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 210 ff.

H. Ekkehard Wolff

2019. The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics,

Grant, Anthony P.

2018. Miriam Ayafor & Melanie Green, Cameroon Pidgin English: A comprehensive grammar (London Oriental and African Language Library 20). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. xxi + 314.. Journal of Linguistics 54:4 ► pp. 889 ff.

Hornback, Robert

2018. Harlequin as Theatergram: Transmitting the Timeworn Black Mask, Ancient to Antebellum. In Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions, ► pp. 35 ff.

Prescod, Paula

2018. Licensing negation and negative concord in Atlantic Creoles. In Negation and Negative Concord [Contact Language Library, 55], ► pp. 125 ff.

Klein, Thomas B. & Michael Adams

2017. Continuity versus English Influence in the West African Lexicon of Gullah. American Speech 92:2 ► pp. 107 ff.

OZÓN, GABRIEL, MIRIAM AYAFOR, MELANIE GREEN & SARAH FITZGERALD

2017. The spoken corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English. World Englishes 36:3 ► pp. 427 ff.

Smith, Norval

2017. Krio as the Western Maroon Creole language of Jamaica, and the /na/ isogloss. In Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas [Creole Language Library, 53], ► pp. 251 ff.

Smith, Norval

van den Berg, Margot, Evershed Kwasi Amuzu, Komlan Essizewa, Elvis Yevudey & Kamaïloudini Tagba

2017. Crosslinguistic effects in adjectivization strategies in Suriname, Ghana and Togo. In Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas [Creole Language Library, 53], ► pp. 343 ff.

Velupillai, Viveka

2016. Review of Drechsel (2014): Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17:1 ► pp. 153 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2016. Review of Migge & Léglise (2013): Exploring language in a multilingual context. Variation, interaction and ideology in language documentation. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 31:2 ► pp. 467 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2017. Towards a model of language contact and change in the English-lexifier creoles of Africa and the Caribbean. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 38:1 ► pp. 50 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2017. Unity in diversity. In Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas [Creole Language Library, 53], ► pp. 225 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2019. Inheritance, contact, convergence. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 40:2 ► pp. 202 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2020. Sociolinguistic characteristics of the English-lexifier contact languages of West Africa. In Advances in Contact Linguistics [Contact Language Library, 57], ► pp. 62 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2021. Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple. Frontiers in Psychology 12

Yakpo, Kofi

2022. Social entrenchment influences the amount of areal borrowing in contact languages. International Journal of Bilingualism 26:2 ► pp. 140 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2023. Two types of language contact involving English Creoles. English Today 39:1 ► pp. 12 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2023. The indigenization of Ghanaian Pidgin English. World Englishes

Yakpo, Kofi

2024. West African Pidgin: World Language Against the Grain. Africa Spectrum 59:2 ► pp. 180 ff.

Yakpo, Kofi

2024. Chapter 6. Lost siblings. In Predication in African Languages [Studies in Language Companion Series, 235], ► pp. 154 ff.

BOKAMBA, EYAMBA G.

2015. African Englishes and creative writing. World Englishes 34:3 ► pp. 315 ff.

Bokamba, Eyamba G.

2019. African Englishes and Creative Writing. In The Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 173 ff.

Evans, Stephen

2015. Testing the Dynamic Model. Journal of English Linguistics 43:3 ► pp. 175 ff.

Flamenbaum, Rachel

2014. The pragmatics of codeswitching on Ghanaian talk radio. International Journal of Bilingualism 18:4 ► pp. 346 ff.

Guerini, Federica

2014. Language contact, language mixing and identity: The Akan spoken by Ghanaian immigrants in northern Italy. International Journal of Bilingualism 18:4 ► pp. 363 ff.

Guerini, Federica

2018. “It sounds like the language spoken by those living by the seaside” – language attitudes towards the local Italo-romance variety of Ghanaian immigrants in Bergamo. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2018:254 ► pp. 103 ff.

Guerini, Federica

2022. Ghanaian Immigrants and the Twofold Potential of Italo-Romance Dialects. In Italo-Romance Dialects in the Linguistic Repertoires of Immigrants in Italy [Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities, ], ► pp. 125 ff.

Maier, Georg

2014. The case of focus. In Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 63], ► pp. 173 ff.

Ngefac, Aloysius

2014. The evolutionary trajectory of Cameroonian Creole and its varying sociolinguistic statuses. In The Evolution of Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G49], ► pp. 434 ff.

Gut, Ulrike & Robert Fuchs

2013. Progressive Aspect in Nigerian English. Journal of English Linguistics 41:3 ► pp. 243 ff.

Rupp, Laura

2013. The function of Student Pidgin in Ghana. English Today 29:4 ► pp. 13 ff.

Gut, Ulrike

2012. Standards of English in West Africa. In Standards of English, ► pp. 213 ff.

Valsecchi, Pierluigi

2012. How Kwadwo Regained His Freedom and Put the Slave-Traders in Big Trouble. In African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, ► pp. 267 ff.

Roberts, Jonathan

2011. Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines 45:3 ► pp. 480 ff.

DEUBER, DAGMAR & LARS HINRICHS

2007. Dynamics of orthographic standardization in Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin. World Englishes 26:1 ► pp. 22 ff.

PETER, LOTHAR & HANS‐GEORG WOLF

2007. A comparison of the varieties of West African Pidgin English. World Englishes 26:1 ► pp. 3 ff.

Muysken, Pieter & Geneviève Escure

2006. Creole linguistics. In Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 1 ff.

Muysken, Pieter & Geneviève Escure

2022. Creole linguistics. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 408 ff.

Heine, Bernd

2005. On reflexive forms in creoles. Lingua 115:3 ► pp. 201 ff.

Singler, John Victor

2004. The ?linguistic? asylum interview and the linguist's evaluation of it, with special reference to applicants for Liberian political asylum in Switzerland. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 11:2 ► pp. 222 ff.

Bakker, Peter

2003. Scandinavians and their pidgins and creoles. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 35:1 ► pp. 95 ff.

Kwak, Eun-Joo

2003. Comparisons between Pidgins and ‘Unish’. Journal of Universal Language 4:1 ► pp. 17 ff.

Schneider, Edgar W.

2003. Review of Blythe (2002): Beyond Babel – English on the World Stage. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 24:2 ► pp. 299 ff.

Schneider, Edgar W.

2004. Investigating Variation and Change in Written Documents. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ► pp. 67 ff.

SCHNEIDER, EDGAR W.

2016. Hybrid Englishes: An exploratory survey. World Englishes 35:3 ► pp. 339 ff.

Huber, Magnus

2001. Review of Arends & Perl (1995): Early Suriname creole texts: A collection of 18th-century Sranan and Saramaccan documents. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 16:1 ► pp. 178 ff.

[no author supplied]

2002. Book reviews. Linguistics 40:1

[no author supplied]

2003. Book reviews. Linguistics 41:6

[no author supplied]

2013. Pronominal case. In Varieties of English, ► pp. 65 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. The Spatial Fix. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 64 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Pumping Irony. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 183 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Osu borla no, sardine chensii soo. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 98 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Notes. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 255 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. “Este loco, loco”. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 159 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. The Lettered City. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 213 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Ga Akutso Formation and the Question of Hybridity. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 37 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. “The Beautyful Ones”. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 129 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. References. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 279 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Introduction. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 1 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Conclusion. In Oxford Street, Accra, ► pp. 239 ff.

[no author supplied]

2015. Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages [Creole Language Library, 48],

[no author supplied]

2017. Cameroon Pidgin English [London Oriental and African Language Library, 20],

[no author supplied]

2018. Bibliographie. In Le palimpseste africain, ► pp. 271 ff.

[no author supplied]

2018. Offers and Offer Refusals [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 298],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects