Nigerian Pidgin Alphabet

Nigerian Pidgin is written in Latin script, but no orthography is widely accepted. One proposal, the NLA's Standard Naijá Orthography for common writing, has 23 single letters and five digraphs: a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v, w, y, z, plus ch, gb, kp, sh and zh. It has no standalone c, q or x and writes both close and open e/o vowel sounds as plain e and o.

The NLA's proposed Standard Naijá Orthography for common writing uses plain e and o for both close and open vowel sounds and marks high tone with an acute only when needed; ẹ and ọ with subdots appear in its separate phonological transcription. Where both marks fall on one vowel, as in Sọ́ndè (Sunday) or Wẹ́nẹ́zdè (Wednesday), the letter is ẹ or ọ followed by a combining acute accent, because Unicode has no single ẹ́ or ọ́ character. That combining mark is in the grid too.

This marked spelling is the one in the Unicode CLDR data that lets phones and computers show dates and money in Pidgin; the NLA's proposed Standard Naijá Orthography for common writing instead uses plain e and o for close and open e/o vowels, and marks high tone with an acute only when needed. In everyday use, on WhatsApp, on social media and on BBC News Pidgin, people mostly write English-style spellings with no accents: how far, wetin dey happen, no wahala.

What ẹ, ọ and the accents do

Nigerian Pidgin has a seven-vowel system, but the NLA's everyday Standard Naijá Orthography writes both close and open e/o vowels with the same letters; its separate phonological transcription uses ẹ and ọ to distinguish the open vowels. Plain e is a close e, roughly the vowel of French é; ẹ is the open e of English bed. Plain o is a close o, roughly as in go; ọ is the open o of British law. So the CLDR month names write Ọgọst (August) and Ọktóba (October) with the dotted open vowels.

The accents mark tone. Pidgin grew up among speakers of tonal languages like Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, and the pitch of a syllable is part of how a word sounds. In the NLA's proposed Standard Naijá Orthography, an acute marks high tone only when needed; low tone is normally left unmarked. Many syllables carry no mark at all.

How to type Pidgin letters: ẹ, ọ, the accents and ₦

On a phone, long-press e, a, i, o or u on most keyboards to get é á í ó ú and è. For ẹ and ọ, add a Yoruba keyboard (Gboard lists Yoruba) and look for ẹ and ọ on the e and o keys, or copy them from this page.

On Windows, the US-International layout gives the acute with ' then the vowel (é) and the grave with ` then the vowel (è). In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 1EB9 gives ẹ, 1EB8 Ẹ, 1ECD ọ, 1ECC Ọ, 0301 typed right after a vowel adds the acute, and 20A6 gives ₦. On a Mac, Option+E then a vowel types the acute (é) and Option+` then a vowel the grave (è); the ABC – Extended layout adds a dot below with Option+X then the letter.

In HTML, write ẹ for ẹ, ọ for ọ, ́ for the combining acute and ₦ for ₦. Keep text in Unicode normalization form NFC so that ẹ and ọ stay single characters.

Where Nigerian Pidgin is spoken

Pidgin is Nigeria's widest bridge language: speakers of Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and hundreds of smaller languages fall back on it in markets, bus parks, barracks, campuses and churches across the country. Unicode's CLDR estimates its speakers at roughly 50 million; counts that include everyone who uses it as a second language run much higher. In the Niger Delta, in cities like Warri, Sapele and Port Harcourt, it is many children's first language.

It took shape on the West African coast through centuries of trade with Europeans, and its words come mostly from English, mixed with Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and Portuguese: sabi (to know) and pikin (child) go back to Portuguese saber and pequeno, oga (boss) is Yoruba, wahala (trouble) is Hausa. Its close relatives are the other English-based creoles of the coast: Cameroonian Pidgin, Ghanaian Pidgin and Krio in Sierra Leone.

For the other languages written in Nigeria, see the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and English collections; for the flag, the naira and the country's emoji, see Nigeria.