Awa mission for Naija Guru na to facilitate di transformation of Naija Pidgin from vernacular to full-fledge and robust literary language. To achieve dis mission, we need standard way to write di language. Even though several people don attempt to develop orthography for Naija Pidgin, none of dese attempts don gain significant traction. Di reason for dis na becos dese orthographies déy complex, and dem no get enough documentation and tooling. For early 2024, Nicholas Kajoh and di team for Naija Guru start work on Standard NP, di Naija Pidgin orthography wey we engineer for wide-scale adoption. We craft system wey déy easy to read and write for English language speakers, becos significant portion of people wey dey speak Naija Pidgin dey use English for dia day-to-day activities. Also, we don spend hundreds of hours take document di language and we don build tools to enable people to use am. Na wetin make Naija Guru become di definitive resource on Naija Pidgin for internet.
Dis article dey describe haw dem dey write Naija Pidgin using di Standard NP orthography.
Alphabet
Like with English and many oda languages, Naija Pidgin dey use di 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
Naija Pidgin na tonal language. Wetin e mean be sey, di meaning of some words dey change based on di pitch wey dem dey use pronounce di words. Naija Pidgin get two tones: di high tone and di low tone. Yu fit represent di high tone with acute accent (´) and yu fit represent di low tone with grave accent (`).
We dey use dese accents (or diacritics) for tone disambiguation. No be pronunciation aid or way to represent specific sounds. So, na only tone words dey make use of dem for written Naija Pidgin. Also, na only di acute accent wey we dey use. We dey consider di low tone as common tone, so we no dey mark am with di grave accent.
Examples:
- I go gó wer yu want mek I gó.
- I go buy am.
- I gó buy am.
- I déy gym.
- I dey gym.
- Wen I déy work, I dey work.
- As I waká komot my house, Somto tell me wáka.
Spelling differences for English-origin words
Most of di vocabulary for Naija Pidgin dey originate from English language. We dey spell di majority of dese borrowed words di same way for Naija Pidgin. However, e get some words wey we dey spell differently. Yu fit find all dese words for awa dictionary.
Punctuation
Naija Pidgin dey use standard English punctuation marks including period, comma, exclamation, quotation, question, apostrophe, brackets, parenthesis, braces, hyphen, dash, ellipsis, colon and semicolon.
Hyphenation
- We dey hyphenate words wey wey dey pluralize with di suffix dem e.g. man-dem, people-dem, army-dem etc. See article on plurals for Naija Pidgin.
- We dey hyphenate most words wey déy reduplicated e.g. sharp-sharp, small-small, wuru-wuru etc. See article on reduplication for Naija Pidgin.
- Some compound nouns déy hyphenated e.g. i-too-know, ghana-must-go, bend-down-select etc.