'If we are telling stories that can touch an audience in Sierra Leone, Benin, Ghana or Nigeria then we are doing our jobs,' she adds. Quansah says the World Service team are 'remarkably and pleasantly surprised' by the amount of text content they have been able to produce, but that BBC Pidgin’s long-term success will be in a visual form, including video and data journalism. 'Being digital only and using the languages we are now going into enables us to offer important news and current affairs to audiences we may not have reached before.'Īlthough Pidgin is spoken in different forms across Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, there are a lot of words that unify them all.

'We have always wanted to be able to offer relevant content to a younger audience and to an audience that is under-represented in the media landscape across Africa,' Quansah says. The decision to make this a digital only service was based on the fact that African people prefer to read content on their mobile phones.

They get it now that they see so many people consume and live this language.' 'West African parents don't see Pidgin as a serious language, so they were stunned to find out the BBC were doing this. In Nigeria however, people are very proud of speaking Pidgin,' says Quansah, whose own Ghanian mother was skeptical about the project. 'There is a stereotype in some parts of the continent about being honest that Pidgin is your first language people prefer if you speak English. Because Pidgin is seen as an informal language, there is sometimes a stigma around speaking it, which Quansah thinks the new service is helping to break. And, as it is not studied in schools, it doesn't exist in a standardised written form. Read more: Languages are dying, but is the internet to blame?ĭespite its popularity, people speak Pidgin with varying levels of fluency. It became a mix of English and local languages, which is why it's often offensively referred to as broken English. West African Pidgin English was used as a simple trade language between Europeans and Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Adverts, radio stations, films and music are already produced in Pidgin, but news organisations have traditionally shunned it.

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