ESTHER KRAKUE: Why DID the BBC spend a fortune on a news site in Pidgin English, a dialect with racist roots?
What exactly does the BBC think it’s doing? Why on earth should licence-fee payers foot the bill for a news site written in West African Pidgin — a language that started as a bastardised form of English and was never intended to be written down?
Astonishingly, the World Service now runs a full Pidgin version of the BBC news site, complete with online stories and headlines transcribed into what was once known as Guinea Coast Creole.
The results can be ridiculous. Pidgin is a slang with a limited vocabulary and simplified grammar, spoken on the streets. It is ill-suited to reporting current affairs, and many headlines are barely different from standard English, with just one or two altered spellings.
‘Top Gun actor Val Kilmer die at di age of 65’ needs no translation. Nor does, ‘Why Prince Harry dey quit di Sentebale charity wey e set up in Diana honour’. Of course, ‘di’ is a phonetic rendering of ‘the’, and ‘wey e’ is ‘which he’.
Others might be a little more puzzling, though you’ll get the gist. ‘Wetin Putin tok wey make Trump vex’ announces a report on the Ukraine war, informing us what Putin said to make Trump angry.
‘British boarding schools dey ginger to open for Nigeria’, we are told — meaning the schools are anxious to attract West African pupils.
Pidgin is ill-suited to reporting current affairs, and many headlines are barely different from standard English, with just one or two altered spellings
The entertainment news page is headed ‘Jollificate’, which means ‘to make cheerful’ – not exactly appropriate on a page of stories reporting celebrity deaths, court cases and feuds
Some of the translations are downright laughable. The entertainment news page is headed ‘Jollificate’, which means ‘to make cheerful’ – not exactly appropriate on a page of stories reporting celebrity deaths, court cases and feuds, with headlines such as, ‘Five tins we know about Gene Hackman and im wife death’.
And yes, I understand Pidgin well. I grew up in Ghana and heard it spoken often. In a vast region with many tribal tongues overlapping with national languages, it’s a convenient way for people to converse, no matter where they come from.
An estimated 75 million people in Nigeria alone are able to understand it. But that doesn’t make it an appropriate language for BBC News.
English is the official language of Ghana, though many people also speak Twi, Ewe, Fante or Ga.
It’s also common to hear Hausa and sometimes even Yoruba, with the latter originating in neighbouring Nigeria. And that’s just a few of them.
No wonder British sailors found it easier to encourage a basic English vocabulary and syntax, which became jumbled with all sorts of African words.
It was never designed to be anything but spoken, so it has no hard-and-fast rules or spellings. It’s not even available as an option on Google Translate.
The pronunciation is distinctly African too, something it shares with West Indian Patois.
In the playground, we sometimes spoke Pidgin for fun. But I wouldn’t dream of using it at home. It’s a bit coarse, not at all polite – rather like swearing in front of your parents. Everyone knows how to do it, but there’s a time and a place.
And like swearing, it’s also somewhat unladylike. You’re much more likely to catch a bunch of young men joking around in Pidgin if their girlfriends aren’t with them.
You would never hear the president of Nigeria, for example, give a speech in Pidgin, or even address anyone in it.
As I have said, the language itself has a grim history. It evolved at the height of the slave trade in the 1700s and 1800s, to enable British merchants to talk business with African traders and tribal leaders – business that too often involved the buying and selling of millions of human beings.
Only someone spectacularly missing the point would try to codify it into something readable. And that someone is the BBC World Service.
Their Pidgin service was launched eight years ago at a huge expense, part of a £289 million BBC overseas expansion. The news site is expected to remain available despite the announcement earlier this year that the World Service is axing 130 jobs in a bid to save £6 million a year.
The great value of the World Service is the influence it gives Britain internationally.
Millions of people in West Africa rely on it for unbiased and professionally fact-checked news. It is available in Yoruba and Igbo, and across the continent in several other languages, such as Amharic and Afaan Oromo in Ethiopia, and Tigrinya in Eritrea.
It is these services that should be maintained, not Pidgin. There’s something uncomfortably close to racism about headlines such as ‘17 fact you need know bifor di Oscars’ — as though Africans won’t be able to understand ‘before the Oscars’.
To understand how patronising it all is, imagine a news website written in the Geordie dialect: ‘Ah dinna believe ye! Ant an’ Dec’ve won anutha aword. Is this a joke like?’
Even a born-and-bred native of Newcastle would have to sound out those words mentally to grasp the meaning. Dialect should be spoken, not written. On the printed page, it takes on a mocking tone.
The BBC is widely seen abroad as the last bastion of the King’s English.
That reputation is undermined by the World Service’s frankly bizarre decision to treat Pidgin as a language of equal value.
Any other country would be appalled. Think how insulted the French would be if the Beeb published a website in Franglais for the expats
in Provence. Better to laugh it off than be offended, though. This headline last month made me howl with laughter: ‘Muslim transgender TikToker dey sentenced to prison after e tell Jesus to go cut im hair.’
The story goes on to explain that Ratu Thalisa, an Indonesian transwoman in Sumatra, was livestreaming a video chat to her fans when one man suggested she should get a haircut. Aggrieved, Thalisa retorted that if she needed a haircut, so did Christ.
The result? A prison sentence of two years, ten months for disturbing public order and religious harmony. ‘Di court ruling bin come afta multiple Christian groups bin file police complaints against Ms Thalisa for blasphemy,’ the report continued. She was found ‘guilty of spreading hatred under a controversial online hate-speech law.’
That last line reveals how ridiculous it is to ‘translate’ complex English into Pidgin. It has no equivalents for words such as ‘online’, ‘hate-speech’, or even ‘controversial’.
Equally suspect are the spellings imposed by the BBC. There’s no reason to write ‘continue’ as ‘kontinu’, as if a Pidgin speaker would not be able to recognise the correct spelling.
It’s a standardised version created by the BBC itself in a fit of self-satisfied virtue-signalling. Had people who actually use Pidgin wanted a standardised version, they would have done it themselves, as a local initiative.
They wouldn’t have needed to consult the World Service, an organisation based in London. If the BBC had stopped to think, they might have realised how colonial it seems.
But, as always, Auntie knows best – or so she thinks.
