Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context
A sociohistorical and structural analysis
Author
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 GhaPE’s 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
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | p. xi
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Abbreviations | p. xiii
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Maps | p. xv
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Introduction | p. 1
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A sociohistorical account of Pidgins on the Gold Coast | p. 9
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Excursus: The settlement of the Sierra Leone peninsula, 1787–1850 | p. 59
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The origin and development of West African Pidgin Englishes: linguistic data | p. 75
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The sociolinguistics of Ghanaian Pidgin English | p. 135
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A synchronic-structural description of Ghanaian Pidgin English | p. 165
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Conclusion | p. 253
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Appendices | p. 257
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Index | p. 305
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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
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