West African Pidgin-English -- an Overview: Phonology - Morphology

Schneider, Gilbert D.

doi:10.1177/007542426700100106

Cited by 4 publications

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“…West African and Nigerian Pidgin English: As stated earlier, there is no known NLP work on Pidgin. However, there has been a lot of linguistic work on the language, such as understanding its phonology and morphology [2]. Other works have studied Nigerian Pidgin, the most popular of all West African Pidgin variants [3,4].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English

Ogueji¹,

Ahia²

2019

Preprint

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Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all -West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of the first ever cross-lingual embedding between Pidgin and English. This aligned embedding will be helpful in the performance of various downstream tasks between English and Pidgin. Thirdly, the training of an Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation model between Pidgin and English which achieves BLEU scores of 7.93 from Pidgin to English, and 5.18 from English to Pidgin. In all, this work greatly reduces the barrier of entry for future NLP works on West African Pidgin English.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English

Ogueji¹,

Ahia²

2019

Preprint

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“…Schneider [3]- [8], Todd [9] [10], Menang [11] [12], Mbangwana [13] [14], Todd & Jumban [15], Ayafor [16] and Ngefac and Sala [17], and Sala and Ngefac [18] examined various aspects of its linguistic structure. Todd [19] devoted a book chapter to the description of aspects of its phonology, lexis and syntax.…”

Section: Background To the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first sample of Cameroon Pidgin proverbs was collected by Schneider [6] but Todd [63] is the only other researcher who has devoted a full article to this domain. Her data were picked out from her conversations with Bamenda Grasslanders in the course of a few hours of contact with them.…”

Section: Work On Cameroon Pidgin Proverbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Some Features of the Syntax of Proverbs in Cameroon Pidgin English

Kouega¹

2017

OALib

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This paper examines the structure of Cameroon Pidgin English proverbs. The data are drawn from a sample of proverbs which seem to have originated from the context of use of the language itself and are therefore not translations from foreign languages and cultures. The analysis, which is done following Quirk et al.'s model of syntactic study [1] [2], reveals that simple sentences occur more frequently than compound and complex sentences, with compound sentences being very limited in number. The SVO and SVC clause patterns are dominant in simple sentences and so are positive structures as opposed to negative ones in the whole corpus. Complex sentence proverbs usually contain adverbial and relative clauses. While the position of relative clauses is fixed, that of adverbial clauses is mobile and as a result, cases of fronting are common. Another thematisation technique is clefting, where the element "na" (it is… that) reproduces an earlier sentence constituent and introduces a relative clause in an otherwise simple sentence. This is one of the structural features of Cameroon Pidgin that obviously does not come from the superstrate English; seemingly, it does not come from the substrate Cameroon indigenous languages either.

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“…It is no exaggeration to claim that before 1990 there were fewer than five research works on this language from local researchers and this research could only identify Menang (1979), Ngome (1986), and Mbangwana (1983) as research works from local scholars available before 1990, excluding evangelical documents written to facilitate priestly missions. Although the interest from local scholars on this language increased after 1990 (see, for instance, Tsende, 1993; Ayafor, 1996, 2004, 2006; Leoue, 1996; Alobwede, 1998; Ngefac and Sala, 2006; Neba et al, 2006; Ngefac, 2009 and Sala, 2009), the interest is still below expectation as compared to the numerous works on the language produced by foreign scholars (see, for instance, Schneider, 1960, 1966, 1967; Dwyer, 1966; Todd, 1969, 1971, 1986, 1979, 1991; Féral, 1978, 1980, 1989; Bellama et al, 1983; and Schröder, 2003a & b). This shows that this Cameroonian language is, paradoxically, more of interest to foreign scholars than to local researchers.…”

Section: Localising English and Globalising Kamtokmentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalising a local language and localising a global language: the case of Kamtok and English in Cameroon

Ngefac¹

2011

English Today

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This paper assesses efforts being made to promote and expose a Cameroonian local language, Kamtok, to the global, intellectual community and to integrate and promote a global language in the Cameroonian context. Kamtok carries the ecology, culture and identity of Cameroon, besides being one of the most widely spoken languages in the country. The global language which is the focus of this discourse is English, considering that its use is no longer restricted to any particular country. The language, like other colonial linguistic legacies, was transported through colonialism and transplanted in different parts of the world, including Cameroon, and is now serving communication needs beyond the frontiers of its original seat. It is therefore claimed in this paper that Kamtok, like many Cameroonian indigenous languages, is relegated to the background and hidden from the global community, paradoxically because it carries the ecology and identity of Cameroon, and English, like other global languages, is being localized and promoted in the Cameroonian context with every iota of passion and vigour. This type of tendency is predictably rooted in the colonial history or in what Bokamba (2007: 41) calls a ‘ukolonia’ tendency whereby the colonised people were indoctrinated to believe that everything of theirs, including their indigenous languages and culture, was inferior and barbaric. Interestingly, English in Cameroon, unlike Kamtok, has an official recognition and is one of the official languages used for state transactions; it is taught in most, if not all, Cameroonian schools and the variety spoken in Britain is most often the classroom target, though this is done with little or no success; it has been the focus of many research works carried out by local researchers; and its vigorous promotion has even led to the banning of an important Cameroonian language, as shall be discussed later. Kamtok, on the other hand, has witnessed, and is still witnessing, many turbulent moments, such as the open and official banning of its use in some public circles, the complete absence of educational and political efforts to promote it, lack of standardisation, misrepresentation of its developmental status by both scholars and laypeople, and lack of scholarly interest from local researchers.

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West African Pidgin-English -- an Overview: Phonology - Morphology

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English

PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English

Some Features of the Syntax of Proverbs in Cameroon Pidgin English

Globalising a local language and localising a global language: the case of Kamtok and English in Cameroon

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