Ghanaian High School Pidgin English and the quest for a new identity: Antilanguage or Decolonial Practice?

Pidgin English is a contact language that is lexically derived from other languages and possesses structurally simplified morphology. In the context of Africa, pidgin is predominantly a West African phenomenon, functioning as a medium of communication among people who have no first language in common. It is spoken in Cameroun, Ghana, and Nigeria where it is on the verge of becoming a creole.  While scholarship has examined pidgin as a linguistic phenomenon, less attention has been given to it as a social phenomenon. Contextually situating my qualitative study in Ghanaian high schools, I explore students’ acquisition and use of Ghanaian School Pidgin (GhaSPidgin) as a bigger project. For this presentation, I draw on qualitative interview and film language data to describe the features of GhaSPidgin, and to distinguish it from other pidgin varieties. From this premise, I challenge its categorization as a pidgin variety, and as an antilanguage, to argue that GhaSPidgin embodies the features of African Urban Youth Languages (AUYL). With this understanding, I contend that, viewing GhaSPidgin as a decolonial practice provides space for the appreciation of Ghanaian students’ exercise of agency in liberating themselves from global coloniality.