Nigerian Pidgin Literature and the Question of Linguistic Authority in Comparative Literary Studies

The literary use of Nigerian Pidgin English raises important questions about linguistic authority, literary legitimacy, and the politics of language in postcolonial contexts, and a comparative examination of Pidgin as a literary medium illuminates the broader debate about which languages count as appropriate vehicles for serious literature. This study examined selected works in Nigerian Pidgin literature including poetry by Ezenwa-Ohaeto and Ossie Enekwe and positioned them within the global debate about creole and vernacular literatures. A postcolonial linguistics and literary theory methodology drawing on Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Achille Mbembe, and Nigerian language policy scholarship was applied. The study examined how Pidgin, as a contact language developed from interactions between Nigerian languages and English, occupies a unique and contested position: more accessible than standard English, more hybrid than any single indigenous language, and more politically charged than either for its associations with colonial trade and urban popular culture. The analysis traced how Pidgin poetry creates community among its urban, multicultural, multilingual audience while simultaneously performing an implicit critique of the English literary establishment's monopoly on literary prestige. The study concludes that the emergence of Pidgin as a literary medium represents an important development in Nigerian literature's long project of linguistic decolonisation and recommends the inclusion of Pidgin literary texts in undergraduate Comparative Literature syllabi at universities in the South South geopolitical zone, where Pidgin has its deepest cultural roots.

Keywords: Nigerian Pidgin, linguistic authority, creole literature, postcolonial language, literary legitimacy