BBC News Pidgin is an online news service in West African Pidgin English. It was started by the BBC World Service in 2017. It is in Lagos, Nigeria.
Pidgin is one of the most used languages in West Africa. In 2021, researchers said there were over 100 million speakers in Nigeria alone.:80 People use the language to talk to each other across West Africa. It has many types, like Nigerian Pidgin English, Ghanaian Pidgin English, and Cameroon Pidgin English.:79 By 2008, Nigerian Pidgin English was the most spoken of all creole and pidgin languages.:80
British and African slavers first used Pidgin in the late 17th century. They used it to help with the Atlantic slave trade. Then it grew to have many more uses and words. During colonization, people did not like it. They called it a broken kind of English. Some people still think this today. They think people who speak it are not educated well. But now, people with all levels of education and money use Pidgin. Groups do not often say it is okay to use, but people use it in both private and public places.:79-81 West African Pidgin English is mostly a spoken language. It has many types. By 2017, it did not have a standard way to write it.:82
In 2017, West African Pidgin English did not have a common written form. So the BBC made a "standard" form of Pidgin. The goal was to help all West African speakers. Researchers Folajimi Oyebola and Kingsley Ugwuanyi think the BBC's standard form likes Nigerian Pidgin English more than other forms. This is because the news service is mostly about Nigeria.:82 The BBC's standard form has some things other forms do not have, like more use of inflections.
In 2023, Oyebola and Ugwuanyi asked Nigerian university students who read BBC News Pidgin what they thought. The students liked the BBC's Pidgin. They liked that it helped join different Pidgin types together and gave them a more official status. But many students thought the BBC's Pidgin was very different from Nigerian Pidgin English. They said it was too formal and too much like Standard Nigerian English.:94-97
BBC News Pidgin started in 2017. It started with ten other new language services for BBC World Service. This was the biggest growth for BBC World Service since the 1940s. It happened because the government gave the BBC more money in 2016. The BBC already had English and Hausa services for Nigeria. It planned to add Yoruba and Igbo services too. The BBC wanted the Pidgin service to be in Lagos, with reporters working in Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon.
In its first year, over 7.5 million people read BBC News Pidgin.:82 That year, it shared news online, on the radio, and on social media like Facebook and Instagram. In 2023, the BBC said its Pidgin service reached 2.3 million readers in the year before. This was 71% less than the year before. The BBC's Yoruba and Indonesian news services also lost many readers that year. The BBC's global traffic dropped about 10% overall.