![]() "The common man wants to air their views but speaking in English they're scared – they don't want to do gbagam ," said Radio Wazobia morning news presenter Steve Onu, aka DJ Yaw. Later, under colonialism, English became the language of prestige. Like its variants in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Liberia, pidgin began as a form of broken English that allowed the country's coastal inhabitants to barter slaves and later palm oil with European traders. As cars swerve through sweaty streets, it can also be heard blaring on Radio Wazobia, a pidgin-only station played in crammed buses, sleek air-conditioned jeeps and roadside food stalls. It's used in slogans scrawled on crumbling walls and flashy billboards. In Lagos, a Nigerian policeman demonstrated how his English-imported spaniel, Milly, "dey hear pidgin well well" as she obeyed a series of pidgin commands. Current affairs, English and local languages are brewed together to dish up playful imagery at breakneck speed. Officially known as Naija, Nigerian pidgin is spoken by tens of millions across the country. This feedback is private to you and won’t be shared publicly.The reply can range from a chirpy "I dey fine" to a downbeat "Body dey inside cloth," (literally meaning "I'm still wearing clothes"). Mark contributions as unhelpful if you find them irrelevant or not valuable to the article. We may already have more than a million words at our disposal but around 1,000 new words make it into print every year, which just goes to show you can never have too much of a good thing! Let me know the ‘foreign’ words you couldn’t live without by commenting below. And how would we manage without schadenfreude – the word with no direct English translation that means to derive pleasure from another’s misfortune? Take these commonly used examples: cul de sac (French), kowtow (Chinese), tsunami (Japanese), aficionado (Spanish), fest (German for celebration) and intelligentsia (Russian), all of which appear in the dictionary. ![]() Over time, we gradually absorb words once considered “foreign” and adopt them as our own. In fact, language experts estimate the English language contains “loanwords” taken from at least 350 languages. This is part of a well-established trend in which English is enriched by ‘borrowing’ from other languages. Notes accompanying the new dictionary explain, “By taking ownership of English and using it as their own medium of expression, Nigerians have made, and are continuing to make a unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language.” It’s nothing new
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