Major issues in current research on GhP

So far, little has been published on GhP. Up until very recently, studies on Ghanaian English only mentioned the existence of Pidgin in passing. In his investigation of “Education and the role of English in Ghana” Boadi (1971: 51-2) says that Pidgin is widely used in the larger towns, but is not current among educated Ghanaians. Sey (1973: 3) states that apart from a continuum of more or less educated English there is Broken English and Pidgin, the latter usually associated with uneducated laborers from Northern Ghana or other West African countries. Criper’s (1971: 13-4) “Classification of types of English in Ghana” similarly acknowledges the existence of Pidgin.

Since at least the 1980s, there has been an ongoing debate in Ghanaian universities about the supposedly harmful effects that the students’ use of Pidgin has on their academic performance, but most of the articles relating to this question have remained unpublished. The two positions in this controversy are (a) that Pidgin presents a serious threat to literacy and the standard of education in a country that has traditionally prided itself on the high quality of its educational system; and (b) that Pidgin is just one code in the linguistic repertoire of young educated Ghanaians and that it is a useful means of horizontal communication with other anglophone West African countries and of vertical communication (literates-illiterates) in Ghana.

The debate about the spread of Pidgin in secondary schools and universities has mainly centred on the measures to be taken to prevent its supposedly harmful effects on the standard of education. The only studies known to me that also seriously investigate the structure of the student variety are Hyde (1995), who describes some lexical aspects and word-formation processes, whereas Ahulu (1995) provides a short sketch of the lexicon and grammar of what he calls “hybridized English”. Kari Dako of the Department of English at the University of Ghana has been researching the variety used on Ghanaian campuses.

The stigma Pidgin carries in educated circles may also explain why so few structural or sociolinguistic descriptions of the variety have been published. For some linguists, describing GhE would declare it an object worth serious study and would be tantamount to giving official sanction. Only in recent years has Pidgin started to attract the interest of Ghanaian scholars, who now begin to study the variety spoken on campus.

Descriptions of the off-campus (‘uneducated’) variety of GhP are even fewer and again mostly unpublished.