Nigerian Pidgin

Nigerian Pidgin or NPE, also known simply as Pidgin or as Naijá in scholarship, is an English-based creole language spoken as a lingua franca or vehicular language across Nigeria. The language is sometimes referred to as Pijin or Vernacular, and it has over time become the speech form with the widest geographical coverage and largest amount of speakers in Nigeria besides English.

Coming into existence during the 17th and 18th centuries as a result of contact between Britons and Africans involved in the Atlantic slave trade, in the 2010s, a common orthography was developed for Pidgin which has been gaining significant popularity in giving the language a harmonized writing system.

It can be spoken as a pidgin, a creole, a dialect, or a decreolised acrolect by different speakers, who may switch between these forms depending on the social setting. Variations of what this article refers to as "Nigerian Pidgin" are also spoken across West and Central Africa, in countries such as Benin, Ghana, and Cameroon.