Nigerian Pidgin English: phonology

It is generally agreed that Nigerian Pidgin (NigP) is the product of contact between English and Nigerian languages, especially those of the Niger Delta, and Benin and Calabar. However, as Ryder points out (1969: 24), the first European visitors to the coast of Nigeria were not the English but the Portuguese. The question therefore arises whether there was no Portuguese Pidgin before the arrival of the English. Elugbe and Omamor (1991) suggest that a kind of pidgin Portuguese must indeed have developed between the Portuguese and their Nigerian hosts. They further point out that the presence of a substantial percentage of words of Edoid origin in the Portuguese Creole, Saõ Tomense, of Saõ Tomé Island in the Gulf of Guinea (Hagemeijer 2000), supports the existence of a Portuguese Pidgin in Nigeria before the coming of the English. More direct evidence of the existence of a Portuguese Pidgin, which was presumably supplanted by NigP, would be the existence of relics of Portuguese-origin vocabulary in NigP. These are rare (for example sabi ‘know’ and cabin ‘a kind of room’).