Bilingual Lexicography and the Development of a German-Nigerian Pidgin English Dictionary: Theoretical and Practical Dimensions

This study addresses the intersection of bilingual lexicography and contact linguistics by developing the theoretical foundations and a sample compilation methodology for a German-Nigerian Pidgin English dictionary, a reference work of considerable potential utility for commercial, humanitarian, and educational contexts involving German-Pidgin language contact. Nigerian Pidgin English serves as one of the most widely spoken languages in Nigeria, functioning as an essential lingua franca across ethnic and regional boundaries, and its increasing contact with German through trade, migration, and development cooperation has generated a set of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena that current reference resources are inadequate to document or support. The study begins with a comprehensive theoretical analysis of bilingual lexicography methodology, Pidgin linguistics, and the specific challenges of creating dictionaries for contact language varieties with non-standardised orthographies. A corpus of German-Pidgin contact data is compiled from recorded conversations, commercial documentation, and social media interaction across South South and South West Nigeria. Sample dictionary entries are developed following an original microstructure design that accommodates the semantic and pragmatic properties of contact-generated vocabulary. Expert lexicographers evaluate the proposed design through a Delphi consultation. The study contributes foundational lexicographic theory and practical methodology for an underserved reference resource. Keywords: bilingual lexicography, Nigerian Pidgin English, German, contact linguistics, dictionary compilation.