At Naija Guru, we are building Nigerian Pidgin (Naija) language infrastructure. We want to help you communicate better in Naija, especially online. The foundation of this infrastructure is our writing system which we’re calling Konfam. Our aim is to create a standard for writing the Naija language.
Features
Konfam is designed to be pragmatic. We are crafting a system that is easy to read and write for English language speakers, because a significant portion of the Naija-speaking population speaks English and uses it in their day-to-day.
Use of the latin alphabet with no diacritics
This means you can write Konfam conveniently using your English keyboard. The tradeoff is a lack of tone and pronunciation information. Readers have to infer tones and thus meaning, from context e.g is “I go buy am” “I went to buy it” or “I will buy it”? They also need to memorize spellings of words individually because there is no pronunciation guide. English speakers are already familiar with the latter and the majority of words in Naija come from English, so this is not much of a problem.
Adoption of loanword spellings
Most of the words in Naija come from English. There’s also a significant number of loanwords from Nigerian languages like Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. Konfam Naija adopts most of its spellings from these languages. book from English is spelled as book in Konfam, and agbèrò from Yoruba is agbero (diacritics removed). The instances where we’ve changed spellings of loanwords are discussed in the next section.
Adoption of common spelling conventions
Among all the inconsistency in Naija spelling on the internet, there are words which are spelled the same way most of the time. We’ve stuck with those spellings as much as possible e.g oga, garri, abeg, pikin etc.
Spelling Changes
All the words with spelling changes have been added to our dictionary. If you don’t find a given English-origin word in the dictionary, its spelling has not been changed. You can safely assume that we have adopted the spelling.
Nouns
Examples:
| Word | Origin | Konfam Naija Spelling |
|---|---|---|
| ọlọ́pàá | Yoruba | olokpa |
Verbs
Examples:
| Word | Origin | Konfam Naija Spelling |
|---|---|---|
| bathe | English | baff |
| breathe | English | breet |
| knack | English | nak |
Determiners
We have made a significant number of spelling changes to determiners:
| Type | English | Naija |
|---|---|---|
| Article | the | di |
| Demonstrative | this | dis |
| Demonstrative | these | dese |
| Demonstrative | that | dat |
| Demonstrative | those | dose |
| Possessive | your | yor |
| Possessive | her | ha |
| Possessive | our | awa |
| Possessive | their | dia |
| Interrogative | which | wich |
| Determiner of difference | other | oda |
| Determiner of difference | another | anoda |
| Quantifier | enough | enuf |
Determiners not specified in the above table remain unchanged. These include the possessive my, numbers (both cardinal and ordinal e.g one, five, tenth, fiftieth etc), distributives (all, each, every etc) and quantifiers (any, many, some etc).
Adjectives
Examples:
| Word | Origin | Konfam Naija Spelling |
|---|---|---|
| tired | English | taya |
Pronouns
We have made a significant number of spelling changes to pronouns as well.
Personal pronouns:
| Person | Number / Gender | Type | English | Naija |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First | Singular | Reflexive | myself | mysef |
| First | Plural | Reflexive | ourselves | awasef |
| Second | Singular | Subject, Object | you | yu |
| Second | Singular | Reflexive | yourself | yorsef |
| Third | Masculine singular | Object | him | him/im |
| Third | Masculine singular | Reflexive | himself | himsef/imsef |
| Third | Feminine singular | Object | her | ha |
| Third | Feminine singular | Reflexive | herself | hasef |
| Third | Plural | Object | them | dem |
| Third | Plural | Reflexive | themselves | diasef |
The personal pronouns not specified in the above table remain unchanged. These include I, we, me, us, and she.
Demonstrative pronouns:
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| this | dis |
| that | dat |
| these | dese |
| those | dose |
NB: These are the same changes in the section on determiners.
Interrogative pronouns:
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| which | wich |
| who | hu |
Indefinite pronouns:
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| somewhere | somewer |
| anywhere | anywer |
| everywhere | everywer |
| nowhere | nower |
Adverbs
Interrogative & relative adverbs:
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| when | wen |
| where | wer |
| why | wai |
| how | haw |
Adverbs of manner, degree, place, time, frequency & purpose:
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| there | der |
| never | neva |
| enough | enuf |
| here | yer |
Prepositions
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| with | wit |
| without | witout |
| through | thru |
Conjunctions
| English | Naija |
|---|---|
| whether | weda |
| because | becos |
| though | dou |
Punctuation
Konfam Naija adopts standard English punctuation marks (the period, comma, exclamation, quotation, question, apostrophe, brackets, parenthesis, braces, hyphen, dash, ellipsis, colon and semicolon) and their usages. In addition, we have a few rules of our own:
Hyphenation
- Words pluralized with the suffix dem are hyphenated e.g man-dem, people-dem, army-dem etc. See article on plurals in Naija.
- Reduplicated words are hyphenated e.g sharp-sharp, small-small, wuru-wuru etc.
Try out Konfam!
If you’d like to explore Konfam, you can play around with our online spell checker. If you have any questions, feedback, or need help with proofreading/translation, feel free to start a new topic.