A SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF NIGERIAN PIDGIN ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Nigerian Pidgin (NP) — a contact language born from centuries of trade and colonial interaction along the West African coast — has grown from a stigmatized “broken English” into one of the most widely used languages of everyday communication in Nigeria, spoken by tens of millions of people across ethnic and regional lines. This paper examines the effect of Nigerian Pidgin on Standard English usage and communication practices in Nigeria, drawing on a narrative review of literature published between 2022 and 2026 across sociolinguistics, education, and computational linguistics. The review synthesizes evidence on NP’s influence on students’ written and spoken English, prevailing attitudes toward the language among Nigerian students both at home and abroad, and its growing footprint in natural language processing (NLP) research, including sentiment analysis, machine translation, and hate-speech detection. Statistical findings drawn from recent survey- and corpus-based studies show a persistent tension: NP functions as an efficient, unifying lingua franca across Nigeria’s multilingual society, yet it continues to interfere measurably with learners’ mastery of Standard English in formal and academic contexts, and it remains under-resourced and orthographically inconsistent for computational applications. The paper concludes that Nigerian Pidgin should be understood not as a corrupting influence on English but as a legitimate, statistically documented variety whose growing use carries both communicative benefits and pedagogical challenges that require deliberate policy and curriculum responses.