At Naija Guru, we are building Nigerian Pidgin language infrastructure. We want to help you communicate better in Nigerian Pidgin, especially online. The foundation of this infrastructure is our writing/spelling system which we call Standard NP. It’s a standard for writing the Nigerian Pidgin language.
Features
Standard NP is designed to be pragmatic. We crafted a system that is easy to read and write for English language speakers, because a significant portion of the Nigerian Pidgin-speaking population are literate in English and use it in their day-to-day. Also, they are in the best position to learn a new orthography.
Use of the Latin alphabet with minimal diacritics
This means you can write Standard NP conveniently using your English keyboard. While diacritics are present, they are used sparingly i.e only for “tone words”. Tone words are words that can have different meanings based on the intonation used when pronouncing them e.g the word dey. “I dey gym” means “I’m gymming” but “I déy gym” means “I’m at the gym”.
Adoption of loanword spellings
Most of the words in Nigerian Pidgin come from English, its lexifier. There’s also a significant number of loanwords from Nigerian languages like Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. Standard NP adopts most of its spellings from these languages. book from English is spelled as book in Standard NP, and agbèrò from Yoruba is agbero (diacritics removed). The instances where there are spelling differences of loanwords are discussed in the next section.
Adoption of common spelling conventions
Among all the inconsistency in Nigerian Pidgin spelling on the internet, there are words which are spelled the same way most of the time. We stick with those spellings as much as possible e.g oga, garri, abeg, pikin etc.
Spelling differences
All the words with different spellings are in our dictionary. If you don’t find a given English-origin word in the dictionary, its spelling is the same i.e you can safely assume that we adopted the spelling.
Nouns
Examples:
| Word | Origin | Standard NP Spelling |
|---|---|---|
| ọlọpa | Yoruba | olokpa |
Verbs
Examples:
| Word | Origin | Standard NP Spelling |
|---|---|---|
| bathe | English | baff |
Determiners
| Type | English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
Determiners not specified in the above table are spelled the same. 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).
Pronouns
Personal pronouns:
| Person | Number / Gender | Type | English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First | Plural | Reflexive | ourselves | awaself |
| Second | Singular | Subject, Object | you | yu |
| Second | Singular | Reflexive | yourself | yorself |
| Third | Masculine singular | Object | him | him/im |
| Third | Masculine/neuter singular | Reflexive | himself/itself | imself |
| Third | Feminine singular | Object | her | ha |
| Third | Feminine singular | Reflexive | herself | haself |
| Third | Plural | Object | them | dem |
| Third | Plural | Reflexive | themselves | diaself |
The personal pronouns not specified in the above table are spelled the same. These include I, we, me, us, and she.
Demonstrative pronouns:
| English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|
| this | dis |
| that | dat |
| these | dese |
| those | dose |
NB: These are the same differences in the section on determiners.
Interrogative pronouns:
| English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|
| which | wich |
| who | hu |
Indefinite pronouns:
| English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|
| somewhere | somewer |
| anywhere | anywer |
| everywhere | everywer |
| nowhere | nower |
Adverbs
Interrogative & relative adverbs:
| English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|
| when | wen |
| where | wer |
| why | wai |
| how | haw |
Adverbs of manner, degree, place, time, frequency & purpose:
| English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|
| there | der |
| never | neva |
Conjunctions
| English | Nigerian Pidgin |
|---|---|
| whether | weda |
| because | becos |
Punctuation
Standard NP 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 Nigerian Pidgin.
- Most reduplicated words are hyphenated e.g sharp-sharp, small-small, wuru-wuru etc. See article on reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin.
Try out Standard NP!
If you’d like to explore Standard NP, 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.