Our mission at Naija Guru is to facilitate the transformation of Nigerian Pidgin from a vernacular to a full-fledged and robust literary language. To achieve this mission, we need a standard way to write the language. While there have been several attempts at developing an orthography for Nigerian Pidgin, none of these attempts have gained significant traction. The reasons for this include their complexity, and lack of sufficient documentation and tooling. In early 2024, Nicholas Kajoh and the team at Naija Guru started work on Standard NP, a Nigerian Pidgin orthography engineered for wide-scale adoption. 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 speaks English and uses it in their day-to-day. Also, we have spent hundreds of hours documenting the language and building tools to enable people use it, making Naija Guru the definitive resource on Nigerian Pidgin on the internet.
This article describes how Nigerian Pidgin is written using the Standard NP orthography.
Alphabet
Like in English and many other languages, Nigerian Pidgin uses the Latin alphabet.
Sounds
Consonants
| Sound (IPA) | Examples |
|---|---|
| /b/ | – buka – brekete – boli |
| /ʧ/ | – chuk – chop – chaike |
| /d/ | – dis – dodo – ode |
| /f/ | – fashi – fufu – fap |
| /g/ | – garri – gele – gra-gra |
| /gb/ | – gbese – gbedu – gbas-gbos |
| /h/ | – haba – hammer – suffer-head |
| /dʒ/ | – juju – gwanj – jogodo |
| /k/ | – kabash – koboko – koko |
| /kp/ | – kpai – olokpa – sakpa |
| /l/ | – lekpa – long-throat – last-last |
| /m/ | – manya – ment – omo |
| /n/ | – nak – neva – naija |
| /p/ | – para – pikin – sharp-sharp |
| /r/ | – rake – reason – wuru-wuru |
| /s/ | – sabi – sama – mess |
| /ʃ/ | – olosho – sha – wash |
| /t/ | – tey – toast – totori |
| /v/ | – jangolova – over-sabi – liver |
| /w/ | – swallow – trowey – wahala |
| /ɲ/ | – nyash – manya – nyafu-nyafu |
| /z/ | – woze – razz – famz |
| /ʒ/ | – measure – pressure – leisure |
Vowels
| Sound (IPA) | Examples |
|---|---|
| /a/ | – na – waká – dash |
| /e/ | – dey – mek – wetin |
| /ε/ | – dem – wen – belle |
| /i/ | – abi – biko – dis |
| /o/ | – koko – gobe – babalawo |
| /ɔ/ | – for – kon – chop |
| /u/ | – yu – una – chuk |
Tones
Nigerian Pidgin is a tonal language. This means that the meaning of some words change based on the pitch used when pronouncing them. There are two tones: the high tone and the low tone. The high tone can be represented by an acute accent (´) and the low tone by a grave accent (`).
These accents (or diacritics) are a tool for tone disambiguation, not a pronunciation aid or a means to represent specific sounds. Thus, only tone words make use of them in written Nigerian Pidgin. Also, only the acute accent is used. The low tone is considered the common tone and thus not marked with the grave accent.
Examples:
- I go gó wer yu want mek I gó.
- I’ll go where you want me to go.
- I go buy am.
- I will buy it.
- I gó buy am.
- I went to buy it.
- I déy gym.
- I’m at the gym.
- I dey gym.
- I’m gymming.
- Wen I déy work, I dey work.
- I work when at work.
- As I waká komot my house, Somto tell me wáka.
- As I walked out of my house, I was insulted by Somto.
Spelling differences in English-origin words
Most of the vocabulary in Nigerian Pidgin originates from the English language. The majority of these borrowed words are spelled the same way in Nigerian Pidgin. However, there are some words that are spelled differently. You can find all these words in our dictionary.
Punctuation
Nigerian Pidgin uses standard English punctuation marks including the period, comma, exclamation, quotation, question, apostrophe, brackets, parenthesis, braces, hyphen, dash, ellipsis, colon and semicolon.
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.
- Some compound nouns are hyphenated e.g. i-too-know, ghana-must-go, bend-down-select etc.