📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
Nigerian Pidgin English, as a contact language developed in a multilingual coastal West African environment with significant French influence through Francophone neighbours, exhibits calquing phenomena that draw partially on French structural patterns. This study analyses the frequency, distribution, and structural types of French loan translations (calques) in Nigerian Pidgin English as spoken in border and coastal communities in Edo and Delta States. A qualitative corpus methodology was applied to 40 hours of recorded natural speech sampled from market conversations, radio call-in programmes, and community meeting recordings in Asaba, Abraka, and Auchi. Calque identification followed a three-stage process of structural comparison, native speaker consultation, and verification against French and Nigerian Pidgin English lexicographic sources. Results identify 38 candidate calques with plausible French structural origins, the majority in the semantic domains of commercial transaction, food and drink, and social greetings. Syntactic calques were less common than semantic calques, reflecting the grammatical independence of Nigerian Pidgin from French. Generational variation in calque use was observed, with older speakers in border communities showing higher French calque frequency. The study contributes to the documentation of French-Pidgin contact phenomena in the South-South zone and argues for a more systematic approach to tracing French influence on Nigerian Pidgin English lexicography. Keywords: calques, French influence, Nigerian Pidgin English, language contact, Edo State
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