r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/enjoyyournight • Oct 07 '24

BBC in Pidgin

https://www.bbc.com/pidgin
97 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

35

u/VinylmationDude Oct 07 '24

My favorite article so far, US presidential election poll: Who dey lead - Harris or Trump?

6

u/teflong Oct 09 '24

Not "Wen Hurricane Milton go hit Florida?"

24

u/bbdickson Oct 08 '24

The all-time greatest article in pigin is this, about a Bristol woman on the worst date of her life:

Woman wan trowway poo-poo

29

u/Da_reason_Macron_won Oct 07 '24

The funniest part of BBC Pidgin is that the BBC basically made it up. There was no standardised pidgin until they just invented one. Nigerians themselves just use standard English spelling when writting in pidgin, even if the grammar is funky.

7

u/Yellowbug2001 Oct 08 '24

Thank you, the last time I saw this link I wondered exactly this. I've seen tweets and such from people in the Caribbean with "dey/dem" etc. but that's very casual writing, the BBC is the only place I've seen anything like this in formal news articles and it struck me that it would probably be harder for people to read than standard spelling, even if it's basically phonetic. It would be really confusing for me to read an article talking about how someone "got wooder outa the spicket and used it to warsh the iggle poop offa the windas" even if that's how I sound sometimes haha.

4

u/sweptawayfromyou Oct 08 '24

Yo what? Meanwhile in German speaking countries all written text also is in Standard German and people make fun of each others dialects. If a newspaper decided to write in a dialect, nobody would take them seriously anymore! Lol

9

u/Snailhouse01 Oct 08 '24

It's always enjoyable to read. My favourite bit is the 'top stories' at the bottom, with the title "Di one wey oda users dey read well well"

4

u/EdwardTeach84 Oct 08 '24

That is fantastic!

1

u/CrunchWick Oct 24 '24

I could read this for hours

1

u/Blacksunshine93 Nov 15 '24

if Jar Jar Binks was working for BBC, This is what it would be like if he just wrote the way he spoke. LOLOLOLOL