CONTENTS
Chapter One: Pidgins and Creoles
1.1. Definitions
1.1.1 Lingue Franche, Pidgins and Creoles
1.1.2 Nigerian Pidgin: A Problem of Classification
1.2. The Inception of a New Academic Field
1.2.1 The Key Debate: Theories about the Origins of Pidgins
1.2.2 Other Topics of Discussion
Chapter Two: Research on the Internet
2.1 Who Uses the Internet?
2.2 Search Tools
2.2.1 Two Categories of Search Tools
2.2.1.1 Subject Directories and Other Internet Guides
2.2.1.2 Search Engines
2.2.2 Useful Features of Search Tools
2.2.3 Meta-Search Engines
2.2.4 On the Search Tools Covered in this Study
2.2.5 How Search Tools Deal with Questions
2.3 Critical Notes
2.3.1 General Reflections
2.3.2 Source Verification
Chapter Three: Search Results for Nigerian Pidgin - A Case Study
3.1 Possible Approaches
3.2 Analyzing and Comparing Search Results
Results from Individual Search Tools
3.2.1.1 Phrase Search “Nigerian Pidgin“
3.2.1.2 Phrase Search “Nigerian Pidgin English“
3.2.1.3 Advanced Search
3.2.2 Results from New Search Engines
3.2.3 Results from Meta-Search Engines
3.3 Other Starting Points
3.3.1 Starting from a Quality Link Site
3.3.2 Online Discussion Groups
3.3.2.1 Newsgroups
3.3.2.2 Mailing Lists
3.3.2.3 Re: Online Publishing
3.3.3 Contacting Experts
Bibliography
When carrying out research, people traditionally read reference books, conduct interviews, attend conferences and so forth. With the advent of the Internet, another important research source now opens up before us. One of the great features of the Internet is the amount of information it contains. You can look for a job in far-off places. You can look up a phone number for a restaurant in Paris. You can even read the “Complete Works of Shakespeare“ (the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html). But all this newly available information comes at a high price: confusion. The interconnected and dynamic nature of the Internet prevents it from being organized like a traditional medium, such as a book or a newspaper.
Due to the lack of organization to the avalanche of information that a typical search returns, finding relevant information reminds us of looking for a needle in a haystack and can be quite frustrating. It is thus very important to familiarize yourself with the various online research sources. Some people have never heard of meta-search engines, truncation, URL guessing, Usenet or FAQs. Only if we know the features of the Internet, we can benefit in full from it. While in some fields the Internet is already an established research tool, this is still different with relatively exotic disciplines such as creolistics. It is the objective of this study to examine what kind of information can be found on the Internet with respect to pidgin and creole studies in general and Nigerian Pidgin in particular. The paper is also intended to draw attention to how this material should be treated. Many Internet users take all the information on the Web at face value, when especially critical evaluation would be more appropriate. Are the data supplied accurate, complete, up to date? Last but not least, for those who are not familiar with pidgin and creole languages, this paper provides a primary overview about this fascinating subfield of linguistics.
The material-gathering took place between March and April 1999. Please note that since the Internet is a particularly dynamic and fast-changing medium, many Web sites that are mentioned in this study will have been updated, otherwise altered, moved to a new location, or vanished from the Web by the time you read this paper.
1.1 Definitions
1.1.1 Lingue Franche, Pidgins and Creoles
Pidgin and creole studies is a relatively new-established and relatively small research field. The material on this subject area is easier to survey than the millions of Web pages on certain other topics. It is therefore very suitable for this research paper. But above all, pidgins and creoles are a most fascinating phenomenon, the value and potential of which were largely ignored even by linguists before the 1950s. This chapter is designed to provide the novice with a general idea of the concepts of pidgins and creoles. In this connection, you will often come across the term “lingua franca“. Originally, this term was applied to the Proven(al-based trade jargon known also as Sabir, which was used by the Crusaders and merchants who visited eastern Mediterranean ports in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, it serves to denote any language that is used as a medium of communication among people who have no other language in common.
One example is the status of English in India, a multilingual society that naturally requires a common means of communication. So whenever two Indians with different linguistic backgrounds come together, chances are high that they make use of English, although it is native to neither side. In short, English is serving here as a lingua franca. In 1950, the Indian government declared Hindi as the “official language of the Union“ in an attempt to replace the language of the colonial power altogether. However, English, spoken by only four percent of the population, has retained the status of an associate official language (this status was prolonged by an amendment in 1967 for an indefinite time), which clearly shows that English enjoys a prestige out of proportion to the actual number of its speakers, thanks mainly to its function as a “world-language“ and “window on the world“ (cf. Hansen 215-220).
Now imagine two or more people using a language in a variety whose grammatical structure and vocabulary are sharply reduced, for instance grammatical gender is lost and the infinitive is used instead of an inflected form of the verb. This process is known as pidginization. This, incidentally, is exactly what happened during the development from Old English into modern English. Only an estimated 85 percent of the Old English vocabulary survived to the present day, due to the intensive contacts of the English language with other languages. Modern English exhibits a massive mixture of Germanic and Romance languages, often with a synonym from each group, for instance freedom and liberty. This is a widely recognized pidginization process, though it would be inaccurate to say that English is a pidgin. Like the other “ordinary“ languages, English emerged gradually (in the stammbaum sense), whereas pidgins are thought to have come into existence at some point at time. William Robert O’Donnell and Loreto Todd point out though that Middle English might have been a creole for the Normans who adapted it as a mother tongue (O’Donnell/Todd 48).
Ronald Wardhaugh argues that “The process of pidginization probably requires a situation that involves at least three languages, one of which is “dominant“ over the others. If only two languages are involved, there is likely to be a direct struggle for dominance, as between English and French in England after 1066 [...]“ (Wardhaugh 57). Interestingly enough, in this well-known case, it was the socially “inferior“ language that won the struggle, even if only after a long time of co-existence.
Many authorities claim that the word “pidgin“ is a Chinese corruption of “business“. Indeed, as we will learn soon, pidgin languages have very often arisen in short contacts between people who desired to trade with each other. Although this traditional etymology has been challenged by linguistics including Robert A. Hall, Jr., who suggests that the name derived from a South American Indian tribe (cf. Britannica, Volume 22, page 803), experts agree that the term was first applied to Chinese Pidgin English, and later to any language of similar type.
A very small vocabulary is one of the striking properties of pidgins, yet the size of the lexicon varies: Melanesian Pidgin has 2,000 words, whereas Chinese Pidgin English has only 700. Usually, approximately 90 percent of this vocabulary comes from the source languages, often English, French or Portuguese, but not necessarily a European language. Pidgins are therefore not mixed languages, as is often assumed. Since vocabulary is so much restricted, each word necessarily has a greater range of meaning than their counterparts of the respective donor-language. For instance, Nigerian Pidgin knows only one word for finger and toe, since the latter can be regarded as the leg’s finger.
Words such as “prick“ and “kont“ are likely to strike a speaker of Standard English, but are not in the least considered slang or bad language in Nigeria. These are in fact the appropriate terms in Nigerian Pidgin (cf. Faraclas 286). There is a simple explanation to this phenomenon: these must have been the words that the Africans learned from the white settlers:
For the urban poor, soldiers, and many others who made up the early settlers, slang was an important part of daily speech. Such words often became a part of the creole and lost their European connotations in the process: if a creole’s only word for “urine“ was piss, this word became as appropriate as urine in any domain, shedding the vulgarity of its etymon, e. g. Krio CE switpis “diabetes,“ pisbag “bladder,“ pisol “urethra.“ (Holm 78)
Unlike a pidgin, which is suitable only for limited conversation, because it functions only as an auxiliary contact language, a creole is the native language of most of its people. It goes without saying that both vocabulary and syntax of creole languages meet all communication needs important to their speakers. A creole extends its vocabulary by borrowing words from the respective donor language, from the local language(s), or by creating new words. Fine examples of neologisms and phraseologies include “decampee“ (person who switches to a different party, “maverick“), “to have long legs“ (to have influence) and “to smell pepper“ (to face a rough time). Given these observations, it is understandable that creolists want pidgins which have developed into creoles to be treated as any other “real“ language. In this context, it is important to point out that many creole speakers consider themselves to be speakers of the lexifier language, because they feel a sense of inferiority about their languages.
To sum up, pidgins spring from the initial, nonintimate contacts between speakers of different languages, when quick comprehension is more highly valued than grammatical correctness or fine shades of meaning. As contacts grow closer, normally one group learns the other’s language in more detail, which accounts for the fact that pidgins are usually short-lived.
An interesting exception to the rule is the case of Chinese Pidgin English. It survived for three centuries, primarily because each side wanted to keep the other at arm’s length. Hall describes the peculiar situation as follows:
The English regarded the language of the “heathen Chinee“ as beyond any possibility of learning, and began to pidginize their own language for the benefit of the Chinese. The latter held the English, like all “foreign devils,“ in extremely low esteem, and would not stoop to learning the foreigners’ language in its full form. They were willing, though, to learn what they perfectly knew to be an “imperfect“ variety of English or of some other Western tongue, and considered that this was abasing themselves less than learning “real“ English. (Hall 8)
Pidgins persist, however, where a dominant group regards another as childlike or capable only of a simplified version of the “superior“ language, as in the relations between Europeans and American Indians, West Africans, or South Sea natives. Only when a pidgin gradually becomes the native language of a speech community, it is to survive as a creole. This phenomenon has been dubbed creolization. As a matter of fact, many pidgins became creoles in this way, for instance the French-based creoles of Louisiana (known as Cajun), Haiti and the Lesser Antilles, or the Papiamento of Cura(ao (based on Spanish and Portuguese), to name but a few of them.
Pidgins and creoles are spoken all over the world. Creolists are interested in Greenlandic Inuit pidgins and the now extinct Russian-Norwegian trader jargon of the Arctic Ocean, as well as pidginized Bantu languages spoken in central Africa and the creoles of Mauritius and Hawaii. The most well-documented restructured languages are those which arose as a result of European colonial expansion in the past few centuries, notably on islands in the Caribbean, in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific. The two most widely spoken creoles in terms of first language speakers, Haitian Creole (Haiti) and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), draw most of their lexicon from French and English respectively, but note that their grammatical structures are quite unlike their lexifier languages.
1.1.2. Nigerian Pidgin: A Problem of Classification
Creolists justifiably point out that the distinction between pidgins and creoles is not always easy to draw. This is due to the fact that some extended pidgins are beginning to acquire native speakers. This is happening for instance with Tok Pisin, Krio (in Sierra Leone) and Nigerian Pidgin, to name but the three best-known cases. In particular this phenomenon has tended to occur in urban environments, where speakers from different ethnic groups have daily contact with each other. What develops then is a somewhat distinct language of that town. The children of mixed marriages frequently grow up speaking the pidgin as their native language. In the following, I would like to illustrate the things said with an example. For this purpose I chose a common situation in Nigeria, which is the most populous country on the African continent, comprising a large number of different ethnic groups who speak 400 or so different languages. For a Yoruba market woman whose use of Nigerian Pidgin is strictly restricted to business transaction, the language is a pidgin in the true sense of the word. However, apart from the estimated 40 million people who speak it as a second language, more than one million people are estimated to speak it as their first language (These are estimates made by Nicholas G. Faraclas. Later we will see that there are no official figures). For those people, Nigerian Pidgin has become a creolized speech form. This is especially true for children who grow up speaking Nigerian pidgin, because their parents come from different speech communities, and because their playmates from the neighborhood again speak another language. As a matter of fact,
[...] intermarriage, trading and travel have brought Nigerians who speak different languages into close contact with one another for thousands of years. Bilingualism and multilingualism have always been the norm rather than the exception in most parts of Nigeria. For these reasons, it is very likely that pidginized versions of Nigerian languages were widely used in many areas. In fact, pidginized Hausa is still spoken by non-native speakers of Hausa in the markets around Lake Chad while a pidginized form of Igbo is used at present in some Niger Delta markets“ (Faraclas 3).
From this we clearly see that the term Nigerian Pidgin is somewhat misleading, as it is the first language, and thus a creole, for a growing number of Nigerians and serves as a lingua franca for many others. Yet another aspect is that for the pidgin-speaking child from an elite family who hears Nigerian Standard English at school and on the radio, Nigerian Pidgin is in all probability a somewhat decreolized speech form already (cf. chapter 1.2.2). Given these observations, Nicholas G. Faraclas postulates that:
If present trends continue, Nigerian Pidgin will be spoken by most Nigerians by the year 2000 and it is already the most widely spoken language in the country. Nigerian Pidgin is distinguished from the other 400 or so languages by the fact that it is spoken by members of every regional, ethnolinguistic and religious group in the federation. Nigerian Pidgin is distinguished from Nigerian Standard English by the fact that it is spoken by members of every socioeconomic group, while only those with many years of formal education can claim to speak Standard English with any proficiency. For an understanding of Nigerian affairs and for practical communication in Nigeria, a knowledge of Nigerian Pidgin is fast becoming indispensable. (Faraclas 1-2)
To the present day, the Nigerian authorities regard a pidginized form of English as inappropriate to serve as the national language. This is partly due to the fact that pidgins are still widely seen as “broken Englishes“, but it also serves as a means for the Standard English-speaking elite to keep the common people out from politics. In his article “The National Language Issue: A Revisit“ (see chapter 3.3.2.1), Ejike Eze claims that “the social and political elite who are generally highly educated in the colonial language have a major stake in its propagation since its continued use allows them a major share of lucrative jobs and advances their social position and power“. It is notable that Tok Pisin already enjoys the prestige Faraclas wants for Nigerian Pidgin:
The vast majority of the speeches on the House of Assembly of Papua New Guinea are made in Tok Pisin, which is but one indication of the importance of this language in the emerging urban and national society of the country. New Guineans are well aware of the financial and other social advantages that may accrue to fluent speakers of Tok Pisin and are accordingly anxious for their children to learn it. (Kay/Sankoff 64)
I decided on Nigerian Pidgin for my Internet research, because it is on the one hand the most widely spoken pidgin in the world. On the other hand, pidgins and creoles are a rather exotic topic on the Internet. The combination of these two factors guarantee a relatively clear number of online documents. Nigerian Pidgin is widely used in the broadcasting media as well as in novels, plays and poetry. In addition, fellow students from Nigeria informed me about the existence of some pidgin newspapers in Rivers State and Lagos. Moreover, it is remarkable that Nigerian Pidgin is one of the two pidgin/creole languages in which the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights“, available in all major languages, has been translated. The other one is Haitian Creole.
Nigerian Pidgin owes much of its importance to literary works by Nigerian anglophone writers who deliberately employ African-specific elements to establish local color. As a matter of fact, modern Nigerian literature is nowadays considered the most important one in Black Africa. Some of the material about Nigerian Pidgin is connected with these writers, so it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with them: Chinua Achebe, the author of “Things Fall Apart“ and “A Man of the People“, uses Igboisms that can be understood from the context. But the non-Nigerian reader often cannot do without a glossary of Yoruba words and pidgin words when reading plays by Wole Soyinka, who is also known to frequently employ gods from the Yoruba pantheon without explaining them for his non-Nigerian readership. Soyinka achieved world-wide recognition when in 1986 he became the first Black African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. While Chinua Achebe once stated that “the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be new English, still in communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.“, Gabriel Okara, another Nigerian writer, asks more directly: “Why shouldn’t there be a Nigerian or West African English which we can use to express our own ideas, thinking and philosophy in our own way?“ (cf. Kachru). Ken Saro-Wiwa, playwright, environmental activist and President of the “Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People“, executed by the Nigerian regime in 1995, wrote his novel “Sozaboy“ in a language he himself labeled “rotten English“. In the preface, he describes it as
[...] a mixture of Nigerian Pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes good, even idiomatic English. This language is disordered and disorderly. Born of a mediocre education and severely limited opportunities, it borrows words, patterns and images freely from the mother-tongue and finds expression in a very limited vocabulary [...], and is part of the dislocated and discordant society in which Sozaboy must live [...].“
Personally, I find the coinage “rotten English“ unfortunate. It reminds me too much of the terms ignorant people use to refer to what they erronneouly consider merely as poor attempts at mimicking Standard English. The next chapter will bring your attention to similar terms.
1.2 The Inception of a New Academic Field
1.2.1 The Key Debate: Theories about the Origins of Pidgins
Creolists are interested in contact languages, mainly pidgins and creoles, which have arisen through the need of a medium for interethnic contact. Many creolists try to understand the nature of this development process. Most are also interested in how the pidgin and creole languages are used today. Besides, any subfield of linguistics can be applied to pidgin and creole languages, of course.
The significance of pidgins and creoles to general linguistics, anthropology, sociology and related fields has long failed to be recognized. Derisive terms such as “broken English“, “bastard Portuguese“, “nigger French“, “mongrel lingo“ or “baby talk“ all too clearly reflect what earlier generations thought of pidgin and creole languages. As I mentioned before, this partly explains also why Nigerian Pidgin, understood by a high percentage of the country’s population, is still considered “inappropriate“ as the official language by the authorities, and consequently Standard English, spoken by only a small percentage, retains that status.
For a long time, even linguists dismissed pidgins and creoles as merely defective versions of their lexifiers, and unfortunately, the equation of pidgin with bad language has still survived in the minds of some people. In her report “Auf Wiedersehen, English“, Ursula Sautter quoted Walter Krämer, the president of the Society for the Protection of the German Language, an organization that takes up arms against anglicisms, as follows: “The German tongue is deteriorating into a pidgin dialect which will soon no longer be usable as an independent cultural language. We fight against this kind of chimpanzee language.“ Firstly, pidgins are no dialects, and secondly, certain pidgins are widely used in parliament, radio programs, novels, etc. The abuse of the term “pidgin“ in Krämer’s statement reveals his ignorance.
It was not until the first international conference on creole language studies, held in Jamaica in 1959, that pidgin-creole studies became a respectable academic field. Finally, the possibility of a monogenetic theory of pidgin-creole origin, namely the Portuguese-origin hypothesis, advanced sixty years earlier by Dirk Christiaan Hesseling, became a topic of discussion. As to the next conference, David DeCamp writes:
If pidgin-creole as a separate discipline was born in 1959, then it came of age in 1968. The second international conference, also held in Jamaica, revealed how much the field had grown in the intervening nine years. The second conference was attended by several times as many scholars as the first, representing a much greater number of territories and interests.
The main research effort in pidgin and creole studies is to find out how those languages evolved, for example whether there has been a sort of “proto-pidgin“, a single language which has developed distinct and mutually unintelligible varieties under the influence of English, French, Portuguese, etc., or whether each pidgin and creole is genetically related to the corresponding standard language, from which it diverged under the influence of a similar sociolinguistic situation. These two opposing notions are called monogenesis and polygenesis.
Early polygenetic approaches involved the transformation of the European source languages, claiming that each pidgin began as a sort of baby-talk used by masters, plantation owners and merchants to communicate with their servants, slaves, and customers. This reflects the eurocentric and racist attitude that speakers of “inferior“ languages are also less capable of learning. As DeCamp sees it, this “baby-talk theory“ is very easy to refute:
If each European had indeed improvised his own variety of baby-talk to communicate with his servants and slaves, how could one explain the fact that all dialects of creole French, including those in the Indian Ocean, are mutually intelligible? The typological similarities shared by creole French, English, Spanish, etc., are too great for coincidence, and when we consider that these creoles also share many common vocabulary words, including syntactic function words, the baby-talk hypothesis completely collapses. (DeCamp, 19)
These similarities appear to favor monogenesis, which claims a single origin for pidgins and creoles. Basically, there are two primary versions of this. The first derives all creoles from the West African Pidgin Portuguese. In the early 1960s, Douglas Taylor and W. Thompson assumed that this Afro-Portuguese jargon was widely spoken from the 15th century to the 18th century in and around the numerous forts and trading settlements founded by the Portuguese along the West African coast. In order to explain the striking similarities between these creoles and creoles with different lexical bases, it was hypothesized that the French, English and other creoles were “relexified“ in a later stage, meaning that the Portuguese lexical items were replaced word for word with French or English items (cf. Arends 88). The similarities of the creole languages would then be due to the underlying Portuguese jargon. The second version incorporates the first and assumes additionally that this pidgin in turn was derived form the medieval Sabir. Monogenesis thus has as its key mechanism the concept of relexification or vocabulary shift. In this connection, it should be pointed out that this theory obviously cannot apply to those pidgins and creoles with non-European lexifiers.
A more restricted approach is to assume that English and French-based creoles derived from a Western African Pidgin English and West African Pidgin French, respectively. The fact that each of these two families of creoles display significant parallels which are not shared between the two groups would suggest a common origin for either of the creole families.
One of the thoughts that presently dominate the creolistic world is the belief that creoles look the way they do because various features were transmitted from the languages spoken by the ancestors of today’s creole speakers, the substrates, much of the non-European looking features in e. g. Haitian Creole would thus be of African origin. Most believe that the socioeconomically disfavored populations who had to adopt a new language were incapable of learning the superstrate (another term for lexifier language), simply because it is difficult for adults to learn a new language.
Taylor suggested that the Atlantic creoles started out as an Afro-Portuguese pidgin that later changed its lexicon under the pressure of various other languages, but more or less maintained their grammatical structures. His comparison of linguistic features common to Yoruba and Atlantic creoles showed that “while African loanwords are relatively few in most West Indian creoles [...] African loan constructions are both common and striking“ (Holm 65). Given these structural similarities, he concluded that:
Lesser Antillean Creole French in its formative period was in close contact with a language or languages very like Yoruba; and as French-based Haitian and Cayenne creoles, English-based Sranan and Saramaccan, and Iberian-based Papiamentu and Saotomense (Gulf of Guinea) show very much the same and other resemblances to Yoruba [...] we conclude that these creoles have diverged from what may well have been a common pidgin by lexical replacement from the languages of the slaves’ European masters and overseers. (Holm 66)
Thus, Taylor’s findings attributes the West African substratum to a language very closely related to Yoruba, which is a typical example of the Kwa branch of languages. This theory is supported by a comparative study of various features in creole and African languages, that demonstrated that a significant proportion of the slaves brought from Africa to the New World during the period in which the creoles emerged were speakers of Kwa languages.
With respect to Nigerian Pidgin, the exemplary pidgin/creole in this study, Faraclas suggests a development process that also helps to support Taylor’s theory, considering that most of the slaves who were deported to the New World, the discovery and exploration of which had led to a huge demand of cheap labor to work on sugar cane and cotton plantations, came from the West African coast:
[...] it is very likely that pidginized versions of Nigerian languages were widely used in many areas [...]. Nigerian Pidgin may very well have developed from one or several such pidginized Nigerian languages that were spoken along the coast before the Europeans arrived. Because of the importance of the European trade and the reluctance of Europeans to learn other languages, European words would have been substituted for Nigerian words to facilitate communication. Since the Portuguese arrived first, a few Portuguese-derived items such as sàbi “know“ and pìkîn “child“ would have been initially adopted, but a the British consolidated power over Nigeria, more and more English words would have been integrated into the language [...]. (Faraclas 3)
Polygenesis used to offer no explanation why pidgins evolved from different source languages can share similar structural features. Here, Noam Chomsky’s theory that children are born with an innate predisposition to recognize certain universals in simplification that facilitates their acquisition of the language of their particular speech community could provide supportive arguments. In the late 1970s, Derek Bickerton proposed the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. Influenced by Chomsky’s theory, he concluded that creole languages reflected structures innate to the human brain. The children who were to constitute the first generation of creole speakers were exposed, he claimed, to a completely chaotic linguistic input. Their parents had different linguistic backgrounds and communicated with each other in a primitive makeshift jargon. The children expanded the jargon, so that it could serve all purposes. This expansion was done not with existing languages as the pattern, but a genetically defined language faculty of the human brain. Therefore, creoles reflect the universal linguistic principles of the human mind, and that is why they are so alike all over the world.
Todd noted possible parallels in child language acquisition and the formation of pidgins:
It is a stimulating thought that pidgins may result from such “simple“ exchanges. Babies soon discard the simple “idealized dialect“ because social pressures put a premium on their acquiring the language of the adult community. But such pressure did not, in the past, prevail in pidgin situations and so the urge to modify towards a more “acceptable“ norm was not a factor in the formation of pidgins. (Todd 47)
Whereas in the past either the monogenetic or the polygenetic approach was held as the only possible explanation, many creolists today prefer a mix of theories. Many of those who are skeptical to the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, for instance, agree that universal principles are relevant in choosing structures provided by the input languages, but reject the possibility that these universal principles could create such structures. Departing from an essay by Salikoko S. Mufwene, Karl-Heinz Stoll concludes that:
Es scheint, daß beide Ansätze, die sich als “substrata versus universals“ (vgl. Muysken/Smith) kontrastieren lassen, jeweils für Teilbereiche ihre Gültigkeit haben und so einander ergänzen. Der in den USA lehrende zairische Linguist Mufwene meint in einem Aufsatz mit dem programmatischen Titel „The Universalist and Substrate Hypotheses Complement One Another“, die weltweiten Ähnlichkeiten von Pidgin- und Kreolsprachen könnten am besten durch Universalien, die gemeinsamen Verschiedenartigkeiten von einigen dieser Sprachen aber durch Substrateinflüsse erklärt werden. (Stoll 194)
1.2.2 Other Topics of Discussion
The creole origins issue continues to inspire more controversy and new research. John Holm once wrote that:
An adequate theory of pidgin/creole origins might contain elements of all the above approaches, and each of them may explain different aspects. In any case, attempts to develop such a theory will be beneficial to general linguistics (including the field of natural language acquisition) as well as to related fields.
Modern creolists also conduct research on many other aspects. Now that the value of pidgin-creole studies is recognized by a growing number of linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, educators, etc., further publications in this field will appeal not only to scholars, but to just about everybody who takes some kind of interest in languages. Take Charles Mann’s work on Nigerian Pidgin for example. His publications include titles such as “The sociolinguistic status of Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin: An overview“, “The place of Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin in Nigerian Education: A survey of Policy, Practice and Attitudes“ and “Language, mass communication and national development: The role, perceptions and potential of Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin in the Nigerian mass media“. At present, he is conducting research on the sociopsychological attitudes of the urban population in southern Nigeria to Nigerian Pidgin. (In chapter 3.3.3, we will learn why Mann favors the term Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin.)
Or consider the issue of Ebonics: The discussion whether non-standard Black English should be considered a creole, and by this an independent language, dates back to the time of the first international conference on creole language. In 1997, it became a highly controversial topic of discussion in the United States, after the School Board of Oakland, California, decided to use Ebonics in class. Advocates of the use and expansion of Black English claimed that students can learn to read and write sooner if they are learning in their own speech variety, which is beneficial to learning in general. They argued that ethnic varieties of speech function is as a symbol of ethnic identity, and can enhance the sense of group solidarity that is important for the empowerment of minorities.
Others took the view that it is indispensable to master Standard English to be successful in work, and that encouraging the use of nonstandard varieties may make it harder to learn Standard English. On the basis of a study involving black speakers in the United States, John R. Edwards indicated that “ [...] speech patterns of regional speakers, ethnic group members and lower-class population [...] evoke unfavorable reactions, at least in terms of status and prestige, from judges who may or may not be standard speakers themselves (Edwards 26).“ So far, the issue has not met with the necessary political (and by that financial) support to become implemented, and fears that official recognition would lead to undesirable consequences cannot be simply brushed aside.
Language is exposed to permanent changes, and as language “moves on“, pidgins and creoles will undergo further changes as well. At present, language experts discuss whether the numerous varieties of English (or “Englishes“) will eventually develop into different languages, as it was the case with Latin in the past. Indeed, speakers of Indian English or West African English no longer consider their way of speaking inferior to British English, but even take pride in it. The issue of Ebonics is a clear sign of this new self-confidence. In his paper “Norms, Models, and Identities“, Braj B. Kachru argues that “English has gradually developed new local centres for authentication of its models and norms. In other words, it has become a pluricentric language with Asian and African norms and models for its acquisition, its teaching, and creativity in the language.“
On the other hand, intensifying contacts and the modern mass media bring about a post-creole continuum that work against such a diversification development. This process, known as decreolization, can be expected to bear especially great influence on territories that are politically and culturally connected to the “home country“. When a creole exists in a community where its lexifier language is the language of education and politics, the two linguistic systems inter-influence each other and people usually start to “improve“ their creole using the standard language as their model (cf. Wardhaugh 78). There is some evidence that Black English in the United States is an example of a creole English which has been exposed to standard for such a long time that it is now in an advanced state of decreolization (cf. O’Donnell/Todd 52).
Various other things can happen to a creole. It can reach a relatively stable relationship with the other languages of the community, it may be extinguished by the standard language, and in some cases a creole has become the standard language, e.g. Afrikaans, Swahili and Maltese (cf. Wardhaugh 82). What happens to a creole under which circumstances? Why is a standard language or established dialect not acquired? These are only some of the questions that creolists try to answer.
A clear proof that creoles have gained some importance is the fact that they have recently entered the domain of machine translation. For instance, Jeff Allan, a creolist who has been involved in research on high-quality multi-lingual machine translation, reported on a project for areas like Miami, where Haitian children attend school in English, “but their parents may be Haitian monolingual. I have heard of a project for developing an English-Haitian Creole system to translate grade reports and correspondence from the schools to the parents and vice versa as this is sometimes necessary in such communities.“ (Jeff Allan in his e-mail from March 26, 1999).
When doing research, people traditionally read reference books, conduct interviews, attend conferences, etc. With the advent of the Internet, another important research source now opens up before us. It is the objective of this study to show what kind of information can be found on the Internet, and how this material should be treated.
2.1 Who Uses the Internet?
“In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of networks which emerged from the research was known as the Internet“. This is how Vint Cerf, one of the researchers and sometimes called “the father of the Internet“, remembers the early stage of the Internet in his paper “A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks“ (www.isoc.org/internet-history/cerf.html).
The development of the Internet was largely financed by the U.S. Federal Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research infrastructure. During the late 1980s, however, the population of Internet users and network constituents expanded internationally and began to include commercial facilities. Indeed, the bulk of the system today is made up of private networking facilities in educational and research institutions, businesses and in government organizations across the globe.
The World Wide Web (often just called the WWW or the Web) is the fastest growing Internet service. Through the Web, you can view images, look at film clips, hear sound recordings, and find valuable and interesting information on any given topic. In fact, the Web has become so popular that very often people are only thinking of this service when they talk about the Internet, which, to be accurate, also comprises services such as e-mail and newsgroups.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in late 1990 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. He is credited with developing the idea of combining hypertext with the speed of today’s electronic networks. Working with a small team, he developed the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on which the Web is based. Berners-Lee is now the Director of the W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to realize the full potential of the Web (cf. www.w3.org/People/W3Cpeople.html and whatis.com/cern.htm).
The Web’s special feature is that its hypertext documents allow you to move from one document to another by selecting highlighted links. Document authors can thus allow you to access related Internet sources. These documents were created using Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, and are often referred to as HTML documents or Web pages. According to Torben Kjaer, a Web site denotes a connected collection of such Web pages:
A Web site is a collection of pages centered around a particular subject, company, organization, service or person. A Web site can be many thousands of pages, or very few. The Web pages are usually all sitting on one Web server, and there is always a home page. This home pages is usually some sort of welcome, perhaps containing a map on the entire Web site together with buttons or links to navigate around the pages, and information on who owns the site. The home page is usually the page which is sent if you just type in the address of the Web server without giving a file name. (Kjaer 11)
The first computers to be attached to the network were computers on American university campuses. Today there are millions of computers attached to the Internet. Now as ever, scientists, scholars and students are among the most vigorous users of the Internet. It enables them to gather information and to communicate with collaborators from far-off places. Other groups who benefit from the masses of scientific documents on the Web, from the numerous online dictionaries and encyclopedias, etc., are e.g. journalists and translators. The Internet is also a rich source for current local, national, and international news. There are hundreds of individual news sites on the Web, from broadcast sources such as CNN or ABC to newspapers including the Washington Post and the New York Times. CNN Interactive, for example, is even searchable. Some search tools cover multiple news sites and news wires, including Yahoo! News (dailynews.yahoo.com) and HotBot News Search (news.hotbot.com). In my search for Nigerian Pidgin, they both retrieved no news articles, so I excluded them from this study. They are certainly a valuable source for research on other topics.
A relatively new market for the computer industry is the Intranet, an internal company version of the Internet, introduced in 1996. Intranet allows workers to electronically access information from company computers via the same user-friendly browsing software used on the Internet. Corporations that adopted this approach said Intranets simplified the work of their employees and thus led to higher worker productivity and lower frustration levels (cf. Alexander 181).
Companies, university members and journalists not only consume the Internet, but in return supply much of the information available on the Web. Universities present their research results, libraries disseminate some of the most valued information, and magazines and newspapers often have online versions. Many companies include a Web site address in their print advertising and television commercials. They make use of the Internet to reach a large audience. 56 percent of U.S. companies will sell their products online by 2000, up from 24 percent in 1998, according to a survey by the Financial Executives Institute and Duke University (cf. www.nua.ie/surveys). All major firms and banks run their own Web sites, and some companies offer free information about a certain subject in the hope that you end up buying their products. Consequently, it is often hard to differentiate between marketing and real information on the Web. And in addition to this, many Web sites are supported by advertising revenue. At other Web sites you receive free information only after giving personal information about yourself, your age, your income, etc. As Kjaer points out, the purpose of collecting these data is usually to be able to come back and try to sell you something. He also warns us that the information could be sold on to other companies (cf. Kjaer 47).
Other groups that seek to present their work on the Web are all kinds of organizations (including political parties) and institutes. Last but not least, the Internet offers innumerable personal home pages, which deal with any conceivable topic.
2.2 Search Tools
2.2.1 Two Categories of Search Tools
In order to go directly to a specific Web site, you need to know its Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are the addresses of documents available on the Internet. As they are built up very logically, it is often possible to guess addresses. For many sites, you do not have to bother with a subject directory or a search engine. When you are searching for a specific organization’s Web site, first try guessing the central URL for the organization. Use the name, acronym, or brief name of the organization (e.g. “un“ for United Nations) in the middle and then add the appropriate top level domain. Incidentally, if you enter uno.org instead of www.un.org into the address field, you will be taken to the home page of the United Networks Organization, which is in no way associated with the United Nations. They are, however, kind enough to offer a hyperlink to the latter! However, if you enter vlib.com instead of vlib.org in your search for the WWW Virtual Library, then you will find yourself at a commercial site, which has not taken the effort to forward your query. All in all, there are six common top level domains: com (for commercial companies), edu (for educational institutions), org (for non-profit organizations), gov (for U.S. federal government), mil (for U.S. military) and net (for Internet service providers and networks). The com and org extensions are not limited to the USA, but can be used by anybody who is willing to pay for them. The URL of a Web page can provide some assurance that its information is reliable. If the Web page resides on a computer belonging to an official organization, this is a good sign. For URL guessing, it is also important to know the most common country codes, e.g. de for Germany and fr for France. The country code for Nigeria is ng. If you cannot guess the URL, you have to search for the document with the help of one of the numerous search tools.
Web search tools fall into two large categories: subject directories (or indexes) and “ordinary“ search engines. One difference between the two is that you can browse the vast collection of categories and sub-categories of a directory such as Yahoo! If you are lucky, you find by browsing a complete listing of all the sites that cover a particular subject. Subject directories include human-selected Internet resources and are arranged and classified in hierarchical topics. An increasing number of universities, libraries, companies, organizations, and even volunteers are creating subject directories to catalog portions of the Internet.
A good rule of thumb is: If your topic is general and consequently widely covered, go for a subject directory first. If your topic is very specific or you want more than a general overview, go for a search engines such as AltaVista, HotBot and InfoSeek. They are sometimes called portals, as they are usually the starting point for search queries. Most search engines are sponsored by advertisers who purchase advertising banners. As a matter of fact, portals are great money-makers.
The major search tools tend to have overlapping but different databases. For instance, if Yahoo! cannot find Web sites within its own categories, the query will be automatically transferred to the Inktomi database, which provides the underlying technology also for other search engines such as HotBot.
2.2.1.1 Subject Directories and Other Internet Guides
Subject directories are valuable for their smaller size of hand-picked sites. For topics with vast quantities of information on the Web, beginning in a subject directory often helps sort out meritorious sites from those that may mention your topic without in-depth treatment. Probably the most complete hierarchical, topical index of Web sites is Yahoo! In addition, it features a sophisticated search facility, which means that it is not only browsable, but also searchable: You can either click through the various categories or enter one or more key words into the search box, which will supply you with a list of categories that contain these words in the title or description.
Yahoo!’s 14 main categories that serve as starting points are Arts and Humanities, Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News and Media, Recreation and Sports, Reference, Regional, Science, Social Science and Society and Culture. Everything contained within Yahoo! lives somewhere in these categories. And this is how the subject tree principle functions: Click on the category that is the nearest match for the subject you are looking for. For example, the main category “Social Science“ combines sub-categories such as Ethnic Studies, History, Psychology and Linguistics and Human Languages. This will display a new page containing sub-categories of the category you chose. A click on “Linguistics and Human Languages“ will show you sub-categories such as Institutes, Journals and Sign Language. Say you are searching for Nigerian Pidgin. Logically, your next clicks are Languages and then Specific Languages. Under Specific Languages I found a list which contains a choice of 90 different languages. There was even a link for “Pidgin“ (we of course know that the term pidgin serves to denote a number of very different languages), and I was eager to see which pidgins/creoles would be mentioned. However, it turned out that this link’s only Web site was a Tok Pisin/English dictionary.
Later I discovered the short list of pidgin-related links that Yahoo! has drawn. To see it, you have to click through to Contact_Languages via Social_Science, Linguistics and Human Languages, Languages, and Language Groups. It is also possible to access this page directly by entering dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_Languages/Language/
Language_Groups/Contact_Languages into the address field. These were the links that this list presented in late March 1999: Tenas Wawa (a semi-monthly newsletter about the Chinook Jargon, a pidgin of Northwest Native American languages, English and French), Glossary of the Chinook Jargon, Creolist Archives, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Kreyol Grammar (a short description of Haitian Creole), Pidgins and Creoles, Post-Contact Languages of Western Australia, Reference Guide for Pidgin and Creole Languages.
This demonstrates that it is not worthwhile browsing a subject directory when searching material about Nigerian Pidgin, for this topic is apparently still too specific. Yahoo! serves very well as a general starting point, though, as we will explore in chapter 3.3.1.
There are also other Internet guides from which you can start your search. The best-known one is the WWW Virtual library at vlib.org, maintained by CERN and later by the W3 Consortium. It is the oldest catalog of the Web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by volunteers who compile pages of links for areas in which they are experts. Categories include “Agriculture“, “Computer Science“ and “International Affairs“, sub-categories include “Gardening“, “Journalism“ and “Linguistics“. The latter is maintained by the Linguist List (cf. chapter 3.3.2), to which you will be automatically transferred. Other examples of Internet guides are Galaxy (galaxy.einet.net/galaxy.html) and Clearinghouse (www.clearinghouse.net/index.html). All these highly selective indexes have the disadvantage that they, unlike Yahoo!, do not run spiders that constantly update and enlarge their databases (see next chapter).
2.2.1.2 Search Engines
When you use a search engine, you search the contents of its database - not the World Wide Web directly. Each search engine operates on its database of URLs, texts, and descriptions selected from the entirety of the World Wide Web. Since none of these databases includes all the Web pages in existence, you get different results from different search tools. If the Internet were a book, search engines would be the index. In order to combat the dynamic nature of the Web, search engines are constantly running software called “spiders“, “robots“ or “crawlers“ that read entire Web sites and update the index entries for that specific search engine. If you want to sort out “the best“ pages on an extensively covered topic, you may profit from the selectivity of some of the smaller, hand-picked databases, whereas large databases are useful for more comprehensive searches.
To use a search engine, you access the search engine’s site, type one or more key words, and click the submit button. If the search engine is able to locate any documents that match your search query, you will be offered a list with hyperlinks that you can click to access the listed documents. Usually, relevancy is computed by examining the frequency of your key words in the retrieved documents. However, a couple of more recently introduced search engines take other approaches.
The large number of available search engines makes it tremendously difficult to choose the right one(s) for your query. Some are very comprehensive, such as HotBot and AltaVista, others are very specific, for instance “the cool gay search engine“ at www.pridelinks.com. All the more reason why you should familiarize yourself with at least the most popular search tools and keep track of new search engines that take innovative approaches. Two newer search engines, Google and Direct Hit are included in this study. A third one, GoTo, launched in June 1998, is according to my experience less promising, but I think it is quite interesting to give you a brief outline of its special approach: Rather than ranking search results according to where and how often certain key words appear, as conventional search engines do, GoTo ranks results according to how much sites are willing to pay. This allows GoTo to do without an advertisement-oriented interface. It has no stock tickers, free e-mail, horoscopes, or other extraneous content that most other search engines offer.
2.2.2 Useful Features of Search Tools
Every search tool is different. They vary in features and size/comprehensiveness. Each has its special features and drawbacks. The most important features in selecting a search tool are those which allow you to refine or focus your search when you need to. I would now like to introduce the most helpful ones.
The way to combine terms using “AND“, “OR“, and “NOT“ is called Boolean logic (after Victorian mathematician George Boole). AND requires all terms to appear in a document, OR retrieves pages with either term, NOT excludes terms. It is important to note that the absence of a symbol is also significant, as the space between key words defaults to either OR logic (e.g. in AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek) or AND logic (e.g. in HotBot, Lycos, Google). Include synonyms or alternative spellings in your search statements and connect these terms with OR logic, for example “freebie OR freebee“. In some rare cases, using only one of the synonyms is more effective. If, for instance, you use the word homosexual, you are likely to run across more scientific information, whereas the key word gay will return you cultural information on happenings, etc.
Certain search engines allow you to use a proximity operator. This is a type of AND logic which specifies the distance between words in a source file. AltaVista and Lycos are among the search engines that let you use the NEAR operator. For instance, say that you are looking for United Nations documents regarding human rights abuses in Nigeria, you may try the following search string: “united nations“ AND “human rights“ NEAR nigeria. In AltaVista, the two terms must be within 10 words of each other in the source file. Lycos allows user-specified distances. Use of this option can help you gain relevance in your search results.
It is a good idea to make use of these more advanced techniques from the outset, instead of only using key word search. Simple key word searching often retrieves irrelevant or too many documents in large databases. Advanced queries can reduce irrelevant hits by making a query more specific. In small databases and in subject directories, however, simple key word searching is usually the best approach, since the small size of the databases makes more complex searching unnecessary. AltaVista instructs its visitors to use advanced search “for very specific searches and not for general searching. Almost everything you need to search for can be found quickly and with better results using the standard search box, where the AltaVista search services sorts the results by placing the most relevant content first. However, if you need to find documents within a certain range of dates or if you have to do some complex Boolean searches there isn’t a more powerful tool on the Web“ (www.altavista.com/av/content/help_advanced.htm).
There are other useful features of search engines. “Phrase searching“ is a feature that requires all the terms to appear in exactly the order you enter them. You only have to enclose the phrase in double quotations, e.g. “World Wide Web“. Otherwise you will get millions of irrelevant Web sites that contain at least one of these three frequent words. Are you looking for terms with many possible endings? Truncation permits retrieving all these variations in one search term. All you have to do is to enter the first part of a key word and insert a symbol, usually the asterisk (*). Examples: femini* retrieves feminine, feminist, feminism, etc., sara*evo retrieves any variant internal spelling. Besides, truncation also enables searching for singular and plural words at the same time. A search for glossar* consequently finds the words glossary, glossaries as well as the German words Glossar and Glossare.
The use of parentheses can also be very helpful. For instance, if you wanted to look up the income tax information for the United States, an advanced query might look like this: “income tax“ AND (“united states“ OR usa OR america). This query instructs the search engine to search for the phrase income tax whenever it appears on the same page with United States, USA, or America.
Furthermore, some search tools let you limit your search to the title field. And indeed, the search title:Krio on AltaVista, HotBot and Yahoo! retrieved only those documents that contained my key word in the title when I tried out this special restriction method in April 1999. The search title:“nigerian pidgin“, however, resulted only on HotBot with one matching Web page: “OHCHR: Nigerian Pidgin English Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, translated into Nigerian Pidgin English by United Nations Information Centre (UNIC, Lagos Nigeria).“ In chapter 3.2.1, I will explain why this is one of the few top quality pages. For this particular query, the other two search tools turned out to be complete failures. AltaVista and Yahoo! not only yielded no single match for the query title:“nigerian pidgin“, they did not even have the above page indexed. The conventional key word search merely retrieved the “Alphabetical Listing of All Translations“ on AltaVista (in 22nd place) and the “Regional Listing of All Translations“ on Yahoo! (in 2nd place), from which you then have to click your way to the Nigerian Pidgin version. This clearly shows that search engines can differ enormously in their results and are consequently worth a comparative examination.
Some search engines allow choosing a certain language. But be cautious when using this option. Most of the time, this function to limit the number of documents orientates itself to the country codes. This means that a search in German retrieves only documents that carry the extensions de (Germany), at (Austria) and ch (Switzerland), but neglects German documents from overseas and the home pages of German companies that operate on a global scale, since their addresses usually end with com.
2.2.3 Meta-Search Engines
In ordinary search engines, you submit key words to a single database of Web pages owned by the search tool, and you get back a different display of documents from each search engine’s unique database of Web pages. Results from submitting very comparable searches can differ widely, but also contain some of the same sites.
Meta-search engines, also called multiple search engines, claim to search all of the big search databases in parallel and to give you a consolidated report of their findings. You enter key words into the search box, and they transmit your search simultaneously to most of the popular search engines and their databases of Web pages. Then you get back a compilation of results containing matching sites from all of the search engines queried. This can save you a lot of time and provide an overview of the kinds of documents available on the Web matching any term or phrase. It may result in locating exactly what you want, especially if you are searching a unique term or phrase.
Meta-search engines do not own any database of Web pages; they use and deliver the databases and searching programs of each of the popular, individual search tools they query. Meta-search engines act as intelligent middle-agents to pass your search through, gather the responses from the individual search tools they query, and then give you a more unified report of results from many different resources. By necessity, meta-search engines are more powerful than the average single search engines, so the fact that most people I asked made exclusive use of individual search engines kept me pondering for a long time. Finally, I turned to Laura Cohen for expert guidance, as she maintains an excellent Internet tutorial at www.albany.edu/library/internet. Shortly after, she replied to me via e-mail and provided me with the following authoritative answer:
The disadvantages are:
With most meta-engines, you are getting a small number of hits. You have to be satisfied with a small number of (usually) relevant hits.
You can’t do complex searches. There is very little fields searching or limiters you can employ on your searches with meta-engines.
There are so many fascinating and useful new engines, such as Direct Hit and Google. If you spend too much time on a meta-engine, you miss some of the latest technological advances.
Meta-engines are very good for what they do, however. They are especially great for obscure topics, or for a picture of what the Web might offer in your topic area. (Laura Cohen in her e-mail from March 2, 1999)
Later I found other sources that outline the significant limitations of meta-search engines as a comprehensive search tool. But none of them impressed me as much as Cohen’s reply did, which was concise and absolutely “hitting the nail on the head“.
2.2.4. On the Search Tools Covered in this Study
There are innumerable search tools to choose from, and their number is incessantly growing. For this comparative study, I decided to use three search tools that are extremely popular at present: the subject directory Yahoo! and the two search engines AltaVista and HotBot. According to a study conducted by the U.S. research institute NEC, no search engine covers more than 45 percent of all Internet sites (cf. Focus 6/1999, page 221). Greg R. Notess estimates that Northern Light indexed almost 130 million pages, AltaVista 106 million, and HotBot 99.5 million until March 1999 (cf. notess.com/search/stats/sizeest.shtml). As their methods of indexing new Web sites differ, the search results will differ too. Departing from his analysis, Notess concluded that Northern Light found the most unique hits, unfortunately also the most dead links, which are URLs that result in a 404 error message (file not found) from the server. The catch to these unique links, dubbed “Special Collection“ and depicted as a “unique combination of premium data representing over 5,400 journals, books, magazines, databases and news wires not easily found on the World Wide Web“ by Northern Light, is that you have to pay in order to see the entire document.
In chapter three, I will also put two new search engines to the test to see whether their approaches to relevancy ranking can guarantee more accuracy. In addition, I will compare the search results yielded on two popular meta-search engines to see whether they really make searching more efficient. But first, let me give you a short introduction to the search tools involved in this study.
Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), launched in December 1995, is a relatively small database. All documents are selected by Yahoo! staff and assigned to a subject classification. Note that these editors do not evaluate the documents. Still, its selectivity can provide an excellent introduction into topics widely covered on the Web. Yahoo! is both browsable and searchable. You can browse Yahoo! by simply clicking on the various categories listed on each page. If your search is too specific for Yahoo!, as it is the case with Nigerian Pidgin, you can also search Yahoo! by entering key words into the search box. Yahoo! then searches for matches in its database and after that ranks the results in order of most relevant to least relevant. A factor that affects relevancy is the number of search words matched (the more words matched, the higher the rank). Besides, a match in the title of a site is ranked higher than a match in the comments or the URL (cf. howto.yahoo.com/chapters/7/3.html)
When you search material by browsing and no categories match your search terms, because your search is too specific for Yahoo!, your query will automatically be transferred to the Inktomi database, a search engine that specializes in indexing every single Web page it can find. This gives it a lot of raw data. As search engines provide good results with very specific requests (and often poor results with general requests), Inktomi will then find some suitable matches most of the time. In addition to this, Yahoo!’s Advanced Search searches DejaNews for Usenet messages (cf. 3.3.2).
AltaVista (www.altavista.com), equally launched in December 1995, is one of the largest databases. It offers two levels of searching: Simple and Advanced. The advanced search offers Boolean logic and results ranking, two of the finest features available in any of the search tools currently in existence, for refining searches and extracting the documents you want. AltaVista offers unusual options such as searching by language and translating search results. It is possible to have any Web page translated by the AltaVista translation service Babelfish (cf. chapter 2.3.1). Moreover, AltaVista is surprisingly good at answering plain-English queries such as “Where can I find a map of Nigeria?“ I will analyze this amazing possibility in chapter 2.2.5.
HotBot (www.hotbot.com), launched in May 1996 and now part of The Lycos Network, is another very large database with considerable potential to refine searches. It lacks truncation, but supports optional Boolean logic and phrase searching. HotBot permits geographical, media-type, and domain searching not available on other search tools. For instance, it is possible to search for only those documents that are hosted by European servers and contain images or videos. These are very useful functions that allow you to significantly narrow down searches based on the medium of the material you are looking for. There is also a date delimiter on HotBot, so one can specify the time frame of published material. Inktomi will continue to provide the underlying technology for HotBot searches. However, about half the first page of searches returned will be branded by Direct Hit’s ten most popular sites for a particular search.
Google and Direct Hit, both launched in 1998, are two of the newer search engines that have been attracting much attention. In chapter 3.2.2, I will put them to the test to see if they can live up to what several reports suggested.
2.2.5 How Search Tools Deal with Questions
Calling itself the “most powerful and useful guide to the Net“, AltaVista prides itself on answering plain-English queries such as “Where can I find a map of Nigeria?“ It has made preparations to answer such frequently asked questions. What happens is that AltaVista shows you the prearranged directory “Where can I find a map of + African country“, whereby you can choose any country ranging from Algeria to Zimbabwe. In this chapter, I will try out how AltaVista deals with these two questions:
Who won the Nigerian presidential election in 1999?
How many people speak Nigerian Pidgin?
Let us begin with the first question. AltaVista returned me two directories for this query: “What are the most recent election results in + African country?“ and “Who is the head of state of + African country?“ A click on the answer button next to the first directory took me to the CNN Web page cnn.com/WORLD/election.watch/africa/nigeria.html. This page is full of valuable information about the Nigerian election in February 1999, but contains no data concerning the election results! What about the second directory? This time AltaVista retrieved a Web page that listed all Nigerian leaders from 1960 to 1998, thus not answering my question, either. It is a pity that AltaVista obviously failed to update this search possibility. AltaVista is doing better with more popular countries, though. When I submitted the same query for Germany, I was already informed that Hans Eichel was the new Minister of Finance, some time before he actually took up the office.
When I entered the first question into HotBot’s search box, HotBot retrieved 230 matches. Most of them were completely irrelevant, however the second document already informed me that Olusegun Obasanjo was the winner of the Nigerian presidential election. The subject directory Yahoo! did even better: It showed me a list of nine relevant Web sites, the first one being the CNN Web page “Obasanjo wins Nigerian presidential election“ of March 1, 1999. Incidentally, it is possible to subscribe to the free CNN service “Headline News Mail“ at cnn.com/EMAIL. Then you will be sent a summary of the current news every day. And, not very surprisingly, on 1 March 1999, the top story of this service was “Obasanjo Wins Nigerian Presidential Election“.
Incidentally, Olusegun Obasanjo, just like Alex Ekwueme, another contender for the presidency of Nigeria, had launched a campaign Web site. However, in a country where few homes have a telephone and with an estimated 1,000 Internet subscribers, the candidates were unlikely to reach most of the electorate through that online campaign (cf. www.nua.ie/surveys).
Now to the second question: How many people speak Nigerian Pidgin? Again, AltaVista provided two directories: “Where can I find demographic information for + African country?“ and “Where can I find extensive historical, economic, and political information about the country + African country?“ A click on the answer button next to the first directory took me to a CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) Web page that gives very comprehensive information on Nigeria, for example that only 57.1% of the population are literate. Under “Languages“ we are supplied with the following information: “English (official), Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Fulani“, but with no details as to the actual number of speakers. (cf. www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ni.html
#people). For the second directory, and this is more interesting, AltaVista took me to the searchable Web site “Nigeria - A Country Study“ (lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/ngtoc.html), which oddly enough none of the traditional searches with search tools yielded so far. I entered pidgin into the search box and was returned a fine article on the ethnic variety on Nigeria, unfortunately somewhat obsolete (“data as of June 1991“). Here is the relevant passage:
The official language of the country is English, which is taught in primary schools and used for instruction in secondary schools and universities. All officials with education to secondary school level or beyond spoke English and used it across language barriers formed by Nigeria's ethnic diversity. Many in the university-trained elite used English as one of the languages in their homes and/or sent their children to preschools that provided a head start in English-language instruction. In addition to English, pidgin has been used as a lingua franca in the south (and in adjoining Cameroon) for more than a century among the nonschool population. In 1990 it was used in popular songs, radio and television dramas, novels, and even newspaper cartoons. In the north, southerners spoke pidgin to one another, but Hausa was the lingua franca of the region and was spreading rapidly as communications and travel provided a need for increased intelligibility. Counting English, the use of which was expanding as rapidly as Hausa, many Nigerians were at least trilingual [...].
(cf. lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query)
Here, AltaVista outperformed other search tools. Still, the question how many people speak Nigerian Pidgin is left unanswered. I also queried a couple of Nigerians and creolists, and in the following chapters, when I will report on their replies, we will see why this question is indeed so difficult to answer.
2.3. Critical Notes
2.3.1. General Reflections
Contrary to popular belief, the Internet is not a cure-all. It currently offers approximately 320 million Web sites (this figure is given both by Focus 6/1999, page 218, and in the paper “Informationsrecherche im Internet“ by Martin Kunz), but that does not mean that you will automatically find much valuable information on any given topic. Many of the resulting items will be peripheral or useless for your research. For many topics, there is simply a lack of quality information on the Web. The Internet is often good for the type of information that you would find in a product brochure, but quality sources of reference information are often non-existent on the Web. Where there is quality information, it is often available only from subscription-based sites, or you have to pay for them, which is true for many documents from the above-mentioned Northern Light.
Whether a specific search query will be crowned with success depends heavily on the kind of information you need, and on your search strategy. Doing research on esoteric topics that are hardly covered on the Internet can be as much time-wasting and frustrating as is dealing with lengthy lists loaded with irrelevant links. Very often, the chaff is out of proportion to the wheat, and the investment of time does not justify the paltry amount of information that the Web yields. Sometimes a trip to a traditional library would have been more helpful. Detlev Kalb, project director of the German search engine Fireball, even estimates that about one third of the German Web sites are trash (cf. Focus 6/1999, page 218).
Be aware that the addresses of Internet sites frequently change and that Web sites can vanish altogether. Do not expect stability on the Internet. A Web site that you find most valuable today might disappear tomorrow, perhaps for no other reason than that the maintainer of that site grew tired of the Internet. Or a certain Web site is currently being updated and therefore not accessible. In this case, the new search engine Google might come in handy: It keeps a copy of many of the Web pages it returns. If the server is down or otherwise not available, this so-called cached version might be helpful. Google claims that using these cached links is often “much faster than following the regular links, though the information you receive will be less up to date. But in many cases, no more frustrating 404 Not Found errors!“
Besides, it is a well-known fact that certain Web sites on the Internet are offensive to some or even most users. Unfortunately, the Internet also serves hate groups by providing them with an unprecedented opportunity to market themselves. According to a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there are currently more than 1,400 Web hate sites on the Internet. This compares to 600 hate sites at the end of 1997, and only one hate site in 1995. The list included sites that were anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Moslem, anti-abortion, as well as sites that promoted racism, hate music, neo-Nazism, and bomb-making (cf. www.nua.ie/surveys).
Those who are concerned about the proliferation of e.g. child pornography on the Web demand the elimination of these sites. On the other hand, however, we also find people who distrust censorship and fear that freedom of speech rights will be abridged. The Chinese government, by the way, makes short work of unwelcome views on the Web such as tibet.org, amnesty.org or cnn.com. These are simply blocked and cannot be visited by the ordinary people. Nevertheless, the Chinese government is wise enough to promote the Internet, being conscious of its economic potential (cf. Strittmatter).
Another point is that you also have to be literate in two senses in order to fully benefit from the Web: computer literacy and a sound knowledge of English are prerequisites. The marketing magazine Emarketer (www.emarketer.com) estimates that 70 to 80 percent of the Web pages are written in English (cf. bild der wissenschaft 3/1999, page 34). The computer industry is consequently another field that helps spreading anglicisms throughout the world. Even the French, normally known as language purists, are eager to use vogue words such as le webmestre or très cyber.
At www.euromktg.com/globstats you will find “the latest estimated figures of the number of each language population on the Internet (native speakers): those who have access to the Internet on a worldwide scale (that is, who have e-mail access) or to the Web.“ The chart is classified by languages. You will learn that 103.6 million English-speaking and 80.2 million non-English speaking people have Internet access. The biggest groups among the non-English speaking people online are the Japanese and the Spanish-speaking community (both 14.2 million), followed by the German-speaking people (13.8 million). Most of the included languages are highlighted and a click on these links shows you the countries where a given language is spoken and some details of each country’s market (population, GDP, etc.). A pleasant thing is that all data is accompanied by sources including the World Statistics Pocketbook (issued by the United Nations) and government Web sites.
According to a report by Computer Economics, Inc., China will have the second largest Internet population by 2005 (with a predicted 37,3 million users), behind the United States (126,6 million users), but pushing Japan into third place (cf. www.nua.ie/surveys).
To address the language barrier problem, AltaVista has recently introduced its free translation service called Babelfish. Whereas the earliest translators just looked up each word or phrase in the target language, Stephen Budiansky feels that most translations today are “surprisingly understandable“. To illustrate this evolution, he recounts the following story:
When the field was still in its infancy, in the early 1960s, an apocryphal tale went around about a computer that the CIA had built to translate between English and Russian: to test the machine, the programmers decided to have it translate a phrase into Russian and then translate the result back into English, to see if they’d get the same word they started with. The director of the CIA was invited to do the honors; the programmers all gathered expectantly around the console to watch as the director typed in the words: “Out of sight, out of mind“. The computer silently ground through its calculations. Hours passed. Then suddenly, magnetic tapes whirred, lights blinked, and a printer clattered out the result: “Invisible insanity“. [...] Babelfish handled that highly figurative phrase with aplomb, rendering it in idiomatic, even nuanced, French as “Hors de la vue, hors de l’esprit“... (Budiansky 81-2)
Somehow, Budiansky did not notice that the idiomatic translation would have been loin des yeux, loin du coeur. Of course, I was very eager to put Babelfish to the test and see for myself. As a trial sentence, I chose the beginning of the above anecdote, which Babelfish rendered into German like this: “Als das Feld noch in seiner Kindheit, in den frühen sechziger Jahren, in einer apocryphal Geschichte war, ging über einen Computer umher, den der CIA aufgebaut hatte, um zwischen englischem und russischem zu übersetzen“. Although the quality of the translations obviously still needs improvement, Babelfish is for some people the only chance to access foreign language documents in that it allows them to understand the gist of the text. Unfortunately, the service presently covers only a couple of European languages.
It should be mentioned that the internationalization of the Web is already in full swing. By 2003 non-English material will account for over half the content published on the Web, up from the current estimate of 20 percent, according to a report in TechServer. Foreign language newspapers are the major contributors to this growth, rapidly catching up on their U.S. counterparts. Therefore, we can anticipate a great demand for translation services like Babelfish (cf. www.nua.ie/surveys).
Keep in mind that the spiders that compile the databases are indiscriminate. Be aware that some of the resources they collect may be outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete. Others, of course, may come from responsible sources and provide you with valuable information. It is essential to evaluate all search results carefully, as far as their accuracy and currency is concerned. Spelling mistakes constitute a problem which is largely neglected, probably because they are usually easy to detect, if that. Proper names that are spelled wrongly, however, can be quite confusing. Consider this example: At www.research.cornell.edu/VPR/CWC/Spring96.html you are told that “Chinua Ahebe“ used Nigerian Pidgin in his book “A Man of the People“. Those who have never heard about African writers before and want to search for “Ahebe“ on a search engine will meet with difficulties. The text does not contain the correct spelling “Achebe“ in other passages, which would have probably helped to clarify the problem.
And then there often remains this gnawing question: How do you know when you are finished or have successfully concluded your research on the Internet? How can you be sure that you did not miss a relevant document? This can be very problematic, due to the large scale of information regarding some topics. It is unproblematic with plain questions such as “What is the name of the legal tender in Nigeria?“, of course.
Last but not least, you must maintain a high degree of discipline when conducting searches on the Internet. With an overwhelmingly large number of Web sites available on “The Information Superhighway“, it is all too easy to find yourself sidetracked and wandering away from your original topic. So the beauty of the Internet, namely the hyperlinks that take you to other servers across the globe within seconds, is at the same time one of its dangers.
2.3.2 Source Verification
The biggest challenge, however, is the fact that much of the information on the Web is unreviewed. Anybody with a small amount of technical skill and access to a host computer can publish on the Internet. This is especially true with Usenet messages (see chapter 3.3.2.1). Some sites demonstrate an expert’s knowledge, while others are amateur efforts. Some may be updated daily, while others may be outdated. As with any information resource, it is important to evaluate the material when conducting research on the Internet. As Gary W. Selnow points out: “The sites often look as authentic as the New York Times, but appearances on this medium can be painfully deceiving.“ (Selnow 173). He has this story to tell about the impressiveness of the Internet:
Look at the conspiracy sites that sprang up in 1996, claiming that TWA flight 800 was destroyed by U.S. Navy missiles. They were so convincing that even veteran newsman Pierre Salinger was duped into believing their validity when he carried their charges to the mainstream press and put his professional reputation on the line. The sites were wrong and Salinger was wrong - and he had the time and the competence to check the facts. (Selnow 173)
This story illustrates that journalists have especial responsibility to verify the information on the Web before using them in their own reports. This puts them into a difficult situation: On the one hand, they risk their credibility when for instance quoting unverified poll results posted on research sites, but on the other hand, there is an immense time pressure imposed on the reporters. Former CBS newsman Marvin Kalb said on one occasion:
On this new medium the problem compounds into a journalistic nightmare. Journalists can turn to the Internet, where there is so much information. But it is often undigested and unsourced, and even if it is sourced, what is the validity of that source? If you use it, you then give it legitimacy through your own stamp, and spread the error not only to a limited group, but to tens of millions of people around the world who then are fed bad information, bad insights, bad perspectives. The tyranny of the file is compounded in the nightmare of the Internet. (Selnow 175)
Another closely related problem is that Web sites almost always reflect the author’s inclination. Here again, it is the users’ responsibility to judge the validity of the information. Charles Kuralt, another CBS newsman, told the following anecdote about the interpretation of facts:
I was reading a piece about Galileo’s dispute with the Catholic Church, and I thought it was a bit different from what I had remembered. It put the Church in a little better light than I recall. I discovered at the end of the site that the article was written by someone from the Vatican. (Selnow 173)
The users of the Internet must always be aware of the fact that the documents on the Web are unreviewed. It is thus in their own interest that they never forget to ask questions like: Who is the author? (does he or she has expertise on the subject as indicated on a credentials page?, is he or she a native speaker?). And who is the author’s target audience, or expressed differently, for which purpose did the author write the article? It is usually quite helpful to see who the “sponsor“ is. Educational institution sites are usually more reliable than personal home pages. Bryan Pfaffenberger points out that in academic circles, information does not get published unless researchers in the area judge the document to be worthwhile. This is called peer review (cf. Pfaffenberger 3). Some home pages contain links to resumes. You may find out that the page was created by a 19-year-old college student with too much free time, or by one of the leading experts in this field. It is often a good idea to contact the author more detailed information. Gaga Ekeh comments on his compilation of “Some pidgin sayings and their translations“ (cis.upenn.edu/~ogunyemi/pidgin.html):
Those sayings on the page are more humorous than “syntactically“ correct (pidgin-wise that is). But the reason Nigerians find them humorous might be of interest. In a place called Warri, in Mid West Nigeria, the pidgin dialect is continually morphing. It almost seems as though the “waffarians“ as they are known, are in an eternal quest for simplicity, using as few words as possible to explain a concept in pidgin. For instance, the phrase: “No face, everywhere tinted“ refers to someone wearing large, dark shades. “Everywhere tinted“ is something of a reference to the cars, mostly military, with tinted windows, not revealing the face of the owner. So, in Warri, you will actually hear people use such phrases, but it’s not widespread or accepted. It’s kind of like underground hip-hop, that’s what Warri or “waffi“ pidgin is like. So, you might not be able to use my sayings as being generally accepted pidgin... (Ekeh in his e-mail from April 4, 1999)
If I had not contacted Ekeh, I would not have obtained this valuable extra information. Or I would even have cited the sayings as standard idioms, which could have given a false impression of Nigerian Pidgin.
One exemplary site that contains peculiar statements is accessible at www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/6503/index.html. It claims to “give an insight to that type of English spoken in West-Africa“. There are six Web pages altogether: “Pidgins“, “Creoles“, “West-African English“, “Other Sources on the Web“, “More about the funny World of Linguistics“ and “The Books we used“. On the two last pages we learn that this site was created on the basis of a linguistic project of the Technische Universität Chemnitz, and we are given the titles of seven reference books about pidgins and creoles. So far, so good. Two things on the other pages struck me immediately:
1.) At one time, the authors claim that pidgins and creoles are “no second class languages as they were and still are the only mean [sic] of communication in some parts of the world. Even today there are considered to be between six and twelve million people still using Pidgin languages“, but later they claim that “Nowadays WAPE [= West African Pidgin English] in Nigeria has more than 20 million speakers.“ Not only is the English peculiar, but also the numbers quoted are contradictory.
2.) The authors’ assertion that “[s]peakers of pidgin languages prefer to use long and latin [sic] words“ is even stranger. The examples they supply are epistule for letter and purchase for buy. First, the authors should have known that by far not all pidgins have European languages as their source languages, and secondly, even closely related variants of contact languages possess a quite different vocabulary stock, so that generalizations simply cannot be made. Mark Sebba, whose books the authors allegedly used for research, says himself: “I don’t see how you could generally verify a statement that Pidgin speakers like to use long and elaborate words. It may be true for certain registers of Nigerian Pidgin - it seems to be part of the stereotype evoked by some of Wole Soyinka’s pidgin-speaking characters, but I haven’t done any research on this. [...]. It would definitely not be generalisable to all pidgins.“ (Sebba in his e-mail from April 14, 1999)
To find more about GeoCities, I chopped off all parts of the URL that come after the www.geocities.com. I was then taken to the GeoCities home page and I discovered that it is a company that provides free personal home pages in one of its 41 themed communities to anyone with access to the Web. These communities are called Neighborhoods and include “Athens“ (education, literature, poetry, philosophy), “BourbonStreet“ (jazz, Cajun food, Southern culture), “Pentagon“ (military men and women), “Pipeline“ (extreme sports) and “Vienna“ (classical music, opera, ballet). Although in principle I very much welcome the idea of promoting home pages, it certainly incorporates the danger that anybody can publish material on topics he or she is not necessarily familiar with. It is also annoying that GeoCities’ sponsors consistently bombard the visitors with advertisement banners that load automatically each time you click on a link.
3.1 Possible Approaches
When you search for a specific topic, you not only can employ different search strategies, but also use different parts of the Internet. The most common way to find material is to enter key words into the search box of a search engine. Another common approach is to browse a subject directory in the hope of finding a quality link site. Consequently, search engines and subject directories are also called Web portals. In addition, I will examine the effectiveness of searching newsgroups, mailing lists, and above all, contacting experts.
I will analyze a large portion of what can be found on the Internet about Nigerian Pidgin in terms of quality, accuracy and usefulness. I will start with the traditional search via search tools in chapter 3.2. and then go on to introduce the other starting points in chapter 3.3.
3.2 Analyzing and Comparing Search Results
Results from Individual Search Tools
3.2.1.1 Phrase Search “Nigerian Pidgin“
These were the number of Web pages found when I searched three of the most popular search engines for a) nigerian pidgin (simple key search), b) “nigerian pidgin“ (phrase search), and finally c) „nigerian pidgin english“ on March 30, 1999:
search toolnigerian pidgin“nigerian pidgin“„nigerian pidgin english“Yahoo!/Inktomi67135HotBot190
33
(English items: 13)15
(9)AltaVista56,18566 (64)30 (29)
The search result with AltaVista is breath-taking, but note that almost all of the 56,185 Web sites retrieved in my search for nigerian pidgin include either the word “Nigerian“ or “pidgin“. I will first focus on the sites found when employing the phrase search “nigerian pidgin“ and then, in the following chapter, analyze whether you are likely to miss relevant matches when using the more specific key word “nigerian pidgin english“.
I would like to begin with Yahoo! Since the topic of Nigerian English is still too specific for Yahoo!, the search results discussed here were provided by its search engine partner Inktomi (cf. the chapter on search tools). I will thus treat Yahoo!/Inktomi like an ordinary search engine in this study. Yahoo! found the smallest number of Web pages. I will analyze whether these pages are, as it might be assumed, top quality Web sites in their majority. The first ten Web sites recommended by Yahoo! were:
Although Yahoo! retrieved 5 matches less than on 25 February, its collection seemed to have improved. The document “Nigerian Languages“ was added to the database and the “Regional Listing of All Translations“ is now in second place. Oddly enough, the article “Pidgin Vs. Rotten English in Soyinka and Saro-Wiwa“, in 3rd place only a month ago, has disappeared from the list altogether. Later we will see that it is in 2nd place on Google’s list. I will discuss the weaknesses of this page in chapter 3.2.2.
Before I go on to discuss the material, let us have look on the first ten search results of Hotbot in order to see how many overlapping results it returns:
The first three matches on Yahoo! are also included in HotBot’s top ten, though ranked in a different order. Some of the other matches are listed in the lower ranks, e.g. “Nigerian Languages“ is in 17th place and “Alphabetical Listing of All Translations“ is in 19th place on HotBot. The others, however, are unique to the respective search engine, so we can say that it makes sense to query more than one search engine. Interestingly, “ Pidgin Vs. Rotten English in Soyinka and Saro-Wiwa“, in 5th place a month ago, was also removed from HotBot’s list of 33 matches. HotBot’s top ten list has not changed as much as Yahoo!’s did: the four first matches were the same, Shana Poplack’s home page moved from place 6 down to place 9. The most important questions are, of course, which Web pages were to at least some extent useful, which pages were completely irrelevant, and which search engine yielded more relevant results?
Yahoo!’s top match “Contents“ is maintained by the Journal of African Music and Popular Culture of the African Music Archive at Mainz University, my alma mater. Basically, it deals with songs by Nigerian musician Fela Kuti who mixes up elements of Standard English, Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba. Four links contained the term Nigerian English in the title: “Typical Features of Nigerian Pidgin in Original Sufferhead“, “Selected Problems of Fela Kuti’s Language as a Mixture of Nigerian Pidgin and Standard English in Fear Not For Man“, “Features of Nigerian Pidgin in Fear Not For Man“ and “Aspects of Tense in Sorrow, Tears, and Blood with Respect to the Aspect and Tense Markers in Nigerian Pidgin“. The lyrics to the three above songs are given in both Nigerian Pidgin and Standard English. Here is a selection of excerpts of the linguistic approach to Fela Kuti’s lyrics: 1.) “The language of Fela Kuti's lyrics consists of at least three languages. [...] It is more difficult to evaluate substratum influence regarding grammar, for one has to know the indigenous languages well. Yet, this is to a great extent what the linguistic research of pidgins and creoles is about. 2.) “There are good examples for the use of /wetin/ and /wey/ which are typical NP words. /Wey/ functions as relative pronoun. This is obvious in sentences like those wey dey for London and we wey live for Africa. /Wetin/, which can also be a subordinative conjunction in [Nigerian Pidgin], appears in the phrases Wetin do them and I go know wetin. Bearing the meaning “what“ in both cases, /wetin/ is an interrogative pronoun in Original Sufferhead. In general it seems to take the place “what“ holds in Standard English. Another striking feature in Original Sufferhead is the reduplication of words, especially English loan-words. This is a significant morphological process in Pidgin English, a process of word formation that can be a process of lexical modification, too.“
From this we can say that “Contents“ was rightly ranked very high. For one thing, it makes the visitors aware that apart from writers who use Nigerian Pidgin, there are also musicians who employ it in their lyrics. But above all, it contains much information on the language itself. The site is naturally of special interest to African music fans, as it lists a huge number of other African music resources online, including three newsgroups. Note that “Contents“ is a prime example of how vague and useless titles of hyperlinks can be!
Yahoo!’s matches 2 and 7 both eventually can lead to Nigerian Pidgin version the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a particularly valuable item. However, only the search engine Google retrieved a direct link to it, so that I decided to discuss that Web page in chapter 3.2.2.
“Nigerian Languages“ gives a brief description of Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa and many more as well as of Nigerian Pidgin, providing information on for instance genetic affiliation and the regions where those languages can be heard. The reader learns that Nigerian Pidgin is partially intelligible with Krio of Sierra Leone and Cameroon Pidgin, and that the Bible was first printed in Nigerian Pidgin in 1957; that it is a creole with native speakers, as well as used as a pidgin between Africans and Europeans, and Africans from different languages; that there is no unified standard or orthography; that it is used in novels, plays, radio, poetry, advertising, and that its importance and use is increasing. This is one of the very few informative sites on Nigeria Pidgin, so it surprises me that, as mentioned previously, it has not been indexed by Yahoo! until recently.
Match 9 with the title “thank you!“ is a list of all the people and organizations that have contributed to The Four Essential Travel Phrases. The title of this project aroused my curiosity and I clicked on the “home page“- button. The site offers the four following sentences in more than 2,000 languages (including Esperanto, Greenlandic Inuktitut, Jamaican Creole English, Latin and Yoruba): 1. Where is my room?, 2. Where is the beach?, 3. Where is the bar? and 4. Don’t touch me there! The Nigerian Pidgin English is: 1. Wey my room dey?, 2. Wey de beach dey?, 3. Wey de bar dey? and 4. Make una no touch me there o!
Africa - Language/Linguistics is a link site compiled by Stanford University. It provides links to e.g. the Ethnologue and the Hausa Home Page. The one that relates to the topic of Nigerian Pidgin is “Some pidgin sayings and their translations“ by Gaga Ekeh. Yahoo!’s link numbers 3, 4, 5 and 8 were lists of publications on all kinds of linguistic aspects (not only on Nigerian Pidgin). While such lists might inform you about valuable reference books on the market, they usually do not supply any online research material.
Oddly enough, a commercial site is HotBot’s first choice: “CA Webhotel - Info: Pidgin and Creole TMA Systems, Singler (ed.)“ presents a book in which seven pidgin languages, including Eighteenth Century Nigerian Pidgin English, are analyzed. The reader is provided with an online order form, but regrettably he/she does not get to see any excerpts from the book.
Matches 4 and 5 are links to the same document, but with different URLs. It is another commercial site, introducing Nicholas G. Faraclas’ book “Nigerian Pidgin“ as “the first comprehensive grammar of Nigerian Pidgin. [It] provides basic descriptive and analytical treatment of the syntax, morphology and phonology of a language which may soon become the most widely spoken in all of Africa.“ This is everything the prospective buyer is told as far as the contents is concerned. Routledge, too, furnishes an online order form.
Match 8 on HotBot is the contents page of a 1986 issue of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. This obsolete page was retrieved, because it announces a review of the book Social and Linguistic History of Nigerian Pidgin English: as Spoken by the Yoruba with Special Reference to the English Derived Lexicon“ by Anna Barbag-Stoll.
Matches 9 and 10 are by pure accident connected. In 9th place, we find the personal home page of Shana Poplack, full professor from the University of Ottawa. In a way, such home pages serve as online visiting cards, mostly with special focus on qualifications and publications. We learn that Professor Poplack has published for instance the paper “Nothing in context: Variation, grammaticization and past time marking in Nigerian Pidgin English“. This information, however, is irrelevant for those people who resort to online material only. Match 10 with the mysterious title “put title here“ presents a concise summary of a paper by Tagliamonte, Poplack and Eze about the pluralization system of Nigerian Pidgin.
None of the links that came after match 10 focused on Nigerian Pidgin; many were only bibliographies of linguistic literature. In 21st place on HotBot we find the Nigerian Pidgin translation of an information brochure of a “non-profit, non-governmental organization, which strives for environmental solutions.“ (www.pearson-college.uwc.ca/pearson/gaia/brochureni.htm). This page is of interest insofar it supplies the second longest sample of Nigerian English I found on the Internet.
Online documents about Nigerian Pidgin itself are hardly available and, provided you find some, not very detailed. “Nigerian Languages“, for example, comprises no more than seven lines. Some items are retrieved because they contain sample sentences; many matches are shopping sites, others tables of contents, but irrelevant to the online searcher.
Please note that unlike with Nigerian Pidgin, a topic which is obviously not widely-covered on the Internet, it is possible and necessary to specify your search for more popular languages such as German: While the simple search on AltaVista found more than 4 million matches for “german“, the advanced search for the key word “german“ and the Boolean expression “morphology AND inflection NEAR noun“ significantly narrowed down the results to 48 matches, the first one entitled “Morphology of German nouns“!
What about the 66 Web pages that AltaVista recommends us? How many new relevant will a third search tool return? Will the results be listed in a more logical order? Based on my experience, I expect this long “hit list“ to be loaded with irrelevant pages, many of which we have already found on Yahoo! and HotBot. Let us now examine whether this assumption is biased or justified. Here is AltaVista’s “top 10“ as of March 30, 1999:
It is worth noticing that the Web page “CA Webhotel - Info: Nigerian Pidgin, Nicholas G. Faraclas“, which occupied the highest position on AltaVista’s list in February, has disappeared entirely from the list. Many other pages from the Creolist Archives Web site, however, are still included, e.g. match 5, which is about the Creolist Archives’ netiquette policy. I will discuss the Creolist Archives Web site in chapter 3.3.1.
Match 6 was a paper on the intercultural nature of modern English, in which the term “Nigerian Pidgin“ appeared only once as an example for a variety of English. Neither did match 7 deal with Nigerian Pidgin itself. It was retrieved because the author cites Poplack’s and Tagliamonte’s paper “ Nothing in context: Variation, grammaticization and past time marking in Nigerian Pidgin English“. Match 8 happened to be a list of Tagliamonte’s publications. Match 12 showed the table of contents of the April 1997 Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages issue. Unfortunately, the online version of this magazine does not offer papers in their entirety, but only provides brief summaries.
With some frustration we notice that many links do not relate to Nigerian Pidgin at all. Moreover, it seems that Yahoo! specializes in retrieving several Web pages from the same Web site, which accounts for the length of its list! Best example: Various pages from the Journal of African Music and Popular Culture site are to be found in the places 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 41, 55 and 59. Remember that Yahoo! returned only the “Contents“ page which lists all relevant links. As for this query, AltaVista outdoes the other search engines in quantity, but at the price of quality and clearness.
Not only is the presentation unclear, but also the order of links gives rise to criticism. Many people tend to look at the first ten or so matches, especially when querying several search engines. Due to the listing of various items from one site, the Nigeria-specific page from the Ethnologue site comes as low as on position 24, despite the fact that it contains more relevant information than almost all other documents that are ranked higher. Since AltaVista’s top ten did not exactly yield much usable material, I guess few people are tempted to browse any further and will thus miss this page. Astonishingly, this page was in first place when using the advanced search (cf. next chapter).
Some Web pages are useless not primarily due to their contents, but simply because of technical problems. “IRIS sound database“, AltaVista’s top choice and HotBot’s third match, claims to have some Nigerian Pidgin texts in stock, but when clicking on those links, the computer informed me that “The requested URL could not be retrieved“. Another point is that it has not been modified since December 1996, which is an unusual long period for Web sites. Most dead links inform you about the infamous Error 404: “Not found. The Web server cannot find the file or script you asked for. Please check the URL to ensure that the path is correct. Please contact the server’s administrator if this problem persists.“
3.2.1.2 Phrase Search “Nigerian Pidgin English“
In this chapter, I will examine whether you are likely to miss relevant matches when using the less general key word “nigerian pidgin english“, as in many texts only the term Nigerian Pidgin is used. The query “anglo-nigerian pidgin“ retrieved hardly any documents and are therefore not dealt with in this study. On Yahoo!, the number of results were reduced to these five pages:
Matches 1 and 4 are pages about the Declaration of the Human Rights and match 2 is one of the pages that is maintained by the Journal of African Music and Popular Culture of the African Music Archive. Like the others, matches 3 and 5 were analyzed above and considered quite useful. So finally I was returned a list that contained only useful links!
HotBot retrieved the following list of 15 matches:
As expected, HotBot’s list was longer and less clear. In fact, it contained many documents of no relevance for this study. In contrast to Yahoo!’s list, however, it included the second longest sample of Nigerian Pidgin that I found on the Internet: “brochurenig“ (cf. chapter 3.2.1.1). Consequently, it depends on the purpose of your research whether you are satisfied by a concise quality list or a more extensive list that includes irrelevant pages. Note that it makes no sense to submit the query “Nigerian Pidgin AND sample“, as the documents in question usually do not contain the word “sample“!
AltaVista retrieved no less than 30 matches. Of the first ten results, match 1 (“Nigerian Languages“) and match 10 (“Ethnologue: Nigeria“) were the most useful ones. You can imagine that most links on the list were completely irrelevant, and I do not want to bore you with more details.
Summarizing we can say that on balance the search phrase “Nigerian Pidgin English“ retrieved shorter and thus more clear lists without missing out extremely relevant Web pages on Nigerian Pidgin.
3.2.1.3 Advanced Search
This chapter examines on the basis of AltaVista’s advanced search whether it is useful to use Boolean operators in the first place. I compared two of the many possible searches: 1.) “nigerian pidgin“ and the Boolean expression “linguistics“ (i.e. the term “linguistics“ must be contained in the text) and 2.) “nigerian“ and the Boolean expression “pidgin AND linguistics“. Although the queries are very similar, the returned results were not equally efficient.
In my first search, AltaVista retrieved 27 Web pages. Here are the first ten matches:
The first six matches were also included in the top ten list in chapter 3.2.1.1. Only one of them, Tagliamonte’s home page, provided some useful material for this study, so I wonder why the machine placed them so high on the list. The valuable page “Ethnologue: Nigeria“ comes only in 12th place, and neither of the three UN pages that the phrase search on AltaVista returned, are any longer included. Even more strange is the fact that match 1 is about the netiquette policy of the Creolist Archives. This page contains none of the key words I entered!
In my search for the key word “nigerian“ and the Boolean expression “pidgin AND linguistics“, AltaVista retrieved a list of 57 matches, thus hardly shorter than the list in chapter 3.2.1.1. But it contains some new documents and is ordered in a different way. On this list, the Nigeria-specific page from the Ethnologue site was given the top place. On this Web page, the Ethnologue provides some useful data about the linguistic situation in Nigeria: “The number of languages listed for Nigeria is 478. Of those, 470 are living languages, 1 is a second language without mother tongue speakers, and 7 are extinct.“ The one language without mother tongue speakers is not Nigerian Pidgin, but Barikanchi, a Hausa-based pidgin used in military barracks. With regard to Nigerian Pidgin, we learn that “[i]t is a creole with native speakers, as well as used as a pidgin between Africans and Europeans, and Africans from different languages. No unified standard or orthography. Used in novels, plays, radio, poetry, advertising. Increasing in importance and use. Partially intelligible with Krio of Sierra Leone and Cameroon Pidgin. Trade language. Bible portions 1957.“ While the Ethnologue provides estimates of the number of speakers for almost all languages on the list (e.g. 10 speakers for Bassa-Kontagora and about 20 million speakers for Yoruba), it has no estimate for Nigerian Pidgin speakers.
Match 2 reminded me that not everything published on the Internet is necessarily in English. The Web page has an English title, “Nigeria in [!] the Net“, but is entirely written in Finnish. In this case, not even AltaVista’s Internet translation service could help me out. The key words “pidgin“ and “nigerian“ appear within the text, they are apparently also used in Finnish. As to the word “linguistics“, it appears only in the bibliography which included mostly English references. As a matter of fact, for those who do not master the Finnish language, the bibliography is the only material they have access to. We already know matches 3 (“Migration - Global Cultural Diversity Conference“) and 4 (“POPLACK, Shana - Full Professor, Linguistics“) from the top ten list in the last chapter. Match 5 is another page from the Ethnologue site, this time for Cameroon. It has nothing to do with Nigerian Pidgin. The word “nigerian“ is always followed by “border“ and appears every time in the text when a given language in Cameroon is spoken near the Nigerian border. Match 6 is the document about the netiquette policy of the Creolist Archives. The remaining four matches on the top ten list were also not worthwhile. Apart from a more justified top choice, AltaVista’s advanced search was not more efficient than the simple search.
3.2.2 Results from New Search Engines
Google and Direct Hit, both launched in 1998, are two of the newer search engines that have been attracting much attention. Google (www.google.com) is another search engine that has come out of the computer laboratories at Stanford University, the original home to Yahoo! and Excite. The Google technique is called PageRank (after co-founder Larry Page), whereby a page may be relevant based on the fact that many other pages point to that particular Web site. A page has also high importance, if other pages with high importance point to it. While this relevancy ranking of Web sites might overlook new Web sites that no other home pages link to, Google will start noticing a new page as it starts getting attention from other Web sites. Google automatically prefers pages where the query terms are found in close proximity. It only supports phrase searching and the Boolean operator NOT (when using Google, you have to prefix your query word with a “-“). Truncation and the OR operator are not available, so sometimes you have to submit queries at least twice. Although this is in my eyes a disadvantage, Google’s innovative approach seems to be quite promising. The Internet Newsroom praised Google as “a user-friendly and useful search engine that has the added charm of not being just another look-a-like portal that has the same thing that every other portal has. In fact, since Google has a simple home page - no news feed, or horoscope, or weather - it is actually easier to use than the big portals like Yahoo!, Lycos, etc., because the page is less busy.“ (cf. www.editors-service.com/articlearchive/google99.html)
Direct Hit (www.directhit.com) ranks the search results according to what other visitors have selected as the most relevant and popular sites for a specific search request. For this reason, it is also called the “Popularity Engine“. Direct Hit says about its service:
[...] Working together with major search engines, the Direct Hit system keeps track of the Web sites that people actually select from search results lists. By analyzing the activity of millions of previous Internet searchers, Direct Hit provides dramatically more relevant results for your search request. To use the Direct Hit service, you run a search as usual at one of our search engine partners. At the top of the results list, you will see a Direct Hit button you can click on to request the most popular sites for your search request. Direct Hit will then deliver a list of the most popular and relevant sites chosen by previous searchers.
The most important of these search engine partners is HotBot. Since February 1999, Direct Hit generates the first search results its users see instead of Inktomi, the creator of the search engine technology currently used by e.g. Yahoo! By integrating the Direct Hit Popularity Engine, which supplements most search results with a helpful list of the ten most-visited sites for one’s query, HotBot hopes that its search results are more accurate now. Users can presently access Direct Hit directly from the Direct Hit site or by running a search at HotBot and selecting the “Get the Top 10 Most Visited Sites for this query“ link.
While normally Direct Hit produces a list of ten, “nigerian pidgin“ is still such an exotic topic that it found only one single match. Consequently, HotBot offers its visitors the choice to view the “Top 1 Most Visited Site for Nigerian Pidgin“, a colorful Web page introducing four African musicians, including a singer from Cameroon who is mentioned to be influenced by the Nigerian musician Fela and to use “street-pidgin lyrics, mixing local dialect with words in English or French“. Thus the only match Direct Hit found had nothing to do at all with Nigerian Pidgin!
Google proved to be much more efficient. On the first of April, it returned a list of 60 matches for the search “Nigerian Pidgin“ and 28 matches for “Nigerian Pidgin English“, each time with the Nigerian Pidgin version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the top of the list. Even more impressive is the fact that Google turned out to be the only search engine that provided this direct link, whereas Yahoo!, HotBot and AltaVista retrieved only pages from which you have to click your way through to the Nigerian Pidgin version. This document is of especial value, for it presents the most extensive sample of Nigerian Pidgin I found on the Internet.
The official “Universal Declaration of Human Rights“ is available in all major languages; the only other pidgin/creole language available is Haitian Creole. Moreover, each language version is supplemented with some information concerning its development and its speakers, which I found very helpful. The Nigerian Pidgin page even includes valuable information about pidgins in general. Another quality characteristic of this Web site is that the reader is provided with links to sources.
To give you a hint on what Nigerian Pidgin English looks like, as well as to allow you to compare it to Standard English, I would like to quote the first three articles of the Declaration:
a) English
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
b) Nigerian Pidgin English
Article1
Everi human being, naim dem born free and dem de equal for dignity and di rights wey we get, as human beings, God come give us beta sense wey we de take tink well, well and beta mind, sake for dis, we must to treat each other like broda and sister.
Article 2
Everi one naim de entitle to all di rights and freedom wey dey for dis small book, no mata di kind language wey person dey speak, di kontri wey one come from, di kind religion wey one de do, di kind ting wey one dey tink, di kind person wey one be, di how dem take born one, di kind place wey come from, di kind propato wey one get or weda you be man or woman.
Dem come talk again say, dem no go look at di way, wey dem dey rule dat kontri or how dem de control do kontri, say no be anoda kontri de rule there or weda na dem dey rule demself or weda dem get one ogbonke kontri we dey rule dem.
Article 3
Everi one naim get right to live, get right to do as e like and right to see say im life safe for where e dey.
In the following, I will analyze the other documents I found by submitting the phrase search “Nigerian Pidgin English“. In chapter 3.2.1.2, I demonstrated that this search is likely retrieve fewer irrelevant pages. This is Google’s complete top ten list:
Although it is not said explicitly, Google seems to use part of Direct Hit’s technology. Before each title, there is a red bar (or a purple one for subsequent results from the same Web site), along with the percentage next to it. Google explains: “The PageRank is a measure of the “importance“ of a page; a result has high PageRank if lots of other pages with high PageRank point to it. The PageRank of a page does not depend on the query you’ve entered, but is instead a property of the page itself.“ (www.google.com/legend.html). The link with the highest percentage is match 7, which was in 12th place on AltaVista. It shows the table of contents of the April 1997 Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages issue, which contains the paper “Plural Marking Patterns in Nigerian Pidgin English“ by Tagliamonte, Poplack and Eze (see chapter 3.2.1.1).
Match 2 is the same document as match 1, though at another URL. Match 3 is the article “ Pidgin Vs. Rotten English in Soyinka and Saro-Wiwa, in which the author quotes Ken Saro-Wiwa’s description of the term “rotten English“ and states that Wole Soyinka uses Nigerian Pidgin. Eventually, he concludes: “Even though Pidgin and Rotten English are used by different authors for different purposes, they both have several goals and reasons in common. They both offer a feasible alternative to using any European language. European languages do, in fact, fail to convey the African vernacular experience.“
The author claims that Nigerian Pidgin is spoken by the upper classes of society. However, all other sources I found indicated that Standard English is the language of the educated people. Unfortunately, the author fails to support his assertion with valid references. In another passage, he says: “ In the specific case of Nigeria, for example, with a population of about 70 million (in 1985) speaking about 250 languages, none of which has more than six million speakers. [sic] English, the official language of the country seemed a possibility worth considering.“ Although I agree here, the figures he offers are hopelessly outdated. The Ethnologue, for example, accounts for 18.5 million speakers of Hausa and Yoruba, and for 17 million speakers of Igbo (cf. www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Nigr.html). Other weaknesses of this document are the abundance of spelling and punctuation mistakes, and the fact that the author fails to make clear that “rotten English“ is a sociomoral term that has no place in linguistics.
Places 4, 5 and 6 were all occupied by Creolist Archives pages. Match 4 was a 1997 issue of the newsletter Pidgins and Creoles in Education containing very informative articles. Magnus Huber writes about Nigerian Pidgin in education:
Except for Sierra Leone, I think it is safe to say that the official policy is not to allow P/Cs to be used in the classroom. [...] Nigerian Pidgin has not yet officially been recognized as a local language of Nigeria (Elugbe 1995:287). The educational policy in Nigeria is that children should be taught in their mother tongue up to the third year in primary school. Where this is impossible, the dominant language of the community may be used. Elugbe (1995: 292) thinks: “It therefore follows that Nigerian Pidgin can be used in teaching many Nigerians where many local languages would have been required.“ Agheyisi (1988:230) says that Nigerian Pidgin is used “as an unofficial medium of instruction at the primary level in some urban schools.
Ayo Bamgbose, who Eze refers to as “Nigerian’s foremost linguist“ (cf. chapter 3.3.2.1) is cited as follows:
Pidgin is an attractive candidate for national language status. It does not suffer from the elitism associated with English [...]. It has major drawbacks, however. First, its language development status is almost non-existent (there are no serious books, for instance, written in pidgin and even the writing of the language is still subject to a great deal of inconsistency as well as confusion with English orthography). Second, there is no large population to back it. (In Nigeria, for example, pidgin is the unofficial language of the armed forces and the police; it is also spoken in the coastal areas as well as in some urban centres, but it is virtually unknown in large areas of the country.) Third, due to its restricted use it is likely to be unacceptable. Fourth, since English is still required for nationalism, and pidgin cannot function in that role, it is often argued that English might as well be retained rather than exchanged for an English-based pidgin.
Although this page supplies extremely valuable data regarding the linguistic situation in Nigeria, it was not retrieved by the other search engines! Again, Google did a much better job than all other search engines. Match 5 supplies a few speech samples of Nigerian Pidgin and match 6 surprisingly turned out to be the posting made to the CreoLIST by Jeff Allen that is one example of the usefulness of mailing lists (cf. chapter 3.3.2.2). Matches 8 and 9 are again the same document, this time a posting sent to the LINGUIST List by a linguist who works as a refugee counselor. This is another great example in connection with mailing lists, so I will present it in chapter 3.3.2.2 as well. Match 10 is the Web page entitled “Nigerian Languages“, the value of which I discussed earlier.
On the whole, Google did a fantastic job (apart from the same documents), as all matches on the top ten list were relevant, and some even unique, including the direct link to the Nigerian Pidgin version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you consider that the second largest sample of Nigerian Pidgin, the information brochure I talked about in chapter 3.2.1.1, is in 17th place, most of the relevant sources that were retrieved by Yahoo!, HotBot and AltaVista were equally found by Google.
I also analyzed the results Google returned for the phrase search “nigerian pidgin“. Interestingly enough, the one Creolist Archives page that informs about Faraclas’ book “Nigerian Pidgin“, here in 6th place, was not included in the other list. The reason is simple: This page does not contain the phrase “Nigerian Pidgin English“. But apart from this document, which is of little interest to most online searchers anyway, no additional relevant matches were unearthed. From this I conclude that it often makes sense to try the more specific synonym first.
3.2.3 Results from Meta-Search Engines
The two meta-search engines I tried out were Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) and Inference Find (www.infind.com). They differ considerably as far as the total number of search tools queried and the presentation of the items found is concerned. Dogpile searches up to 25 different tools, including DejaNews and Reference.com for Usenet searching, and displays the search results individually. It supports the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, and the proximity operator NEAR, allowing users to narrow and refine their searches. Keep in mind, however, that not all tools that Dogpile searches support all of these operators. I will now discuss Dogpile’s results for the phrase search “nigerian pidgin english“ as of April 1, 1999.
On its first page, Dogpile reported that Thunderstone found 0, GoTo “10 or more“ and Yahoo! 0 documents. This information was incorrect, as Yahoo! definitely retrieved 5 items on that day! In order to see more results from other search engines, I had to click a button. Dogpile then loaded the second page which notified me that Lycos’s Top 5% and Mining Co. found 0 documents and that Excite Guide Search retrieved the Web page “Ethnologue: Nigeria“. To see the results from the next set of search engines, I had to click the button another time. Now I learned that WebCrawler and Magellan both found the same page as Excite Guide Search, and that What U Seek found no documents at all. After clicking the button again, I was displayed 10 of the 22 documents that InfoSeek found, 8 of the 41 matches from Lycos and 10 of the 14 matches from Excite Web Search. For the results from AltaVista, I had to click for the fourth time after entering my key word. Seeing all results from AltaVista required further tedious clicks, and to return to InfoSeek to see its results would have been even more time-consuming.
Searching Dogpile was not efficient at all. Its display of lists from the various search engines started with one that retrieved 0 documents and ended with AltaVista which found 30 documents. To see all the results I had to click several times, which is not very encouraging as loading a new page means that you have to wait and that you cannot see the first page any longer. Dogpile claimed that Yahoo! found no documents, but we know that Yahoo! actually did a quite good job. And finally, instead of removing redundancies, Dogpile listed the documents each time they were found on one of the search engines. The fact that Dogpile searches so many search engines in parallel is impressive, its results were not. Searching only Yahoo! is more efficient, and searching only AltaVista less complicated.
Inference Find, active since May of 1995, is a meta-search engine with the distinction of not listing its findings simply as a lists of hits, but it makes “inferences“ and arranges findings according to topical subjects. It searches WebCrawler, Yahoo!, Lycos, AltaVista, InfoSeek and Excite, and claims to be “the only search tool that calls out in parallel all the best search engines on the Internet, merges the results, removes redundancies, and clusters the results into neat understandable groupings“. According to Inference Find, clustering is “a process of putting similar items together. While other search engines sort their results by how well they match the query, Inference Find gets all the best results, and then groups the related items together. This makes the large results returned very understandable. You can quickly see which documents are relevant and which are irrelevant.“ Let us examine whether Inference Find lives up to its claim. This is how the list it retrieved was structured:
I will now discuss only those documents that were not mentioned in the past chapters. Match 1 turned out to be completely irrelevant, as it merely presented the schedule of a conference which took place some time ago. “Research Interests“ describes Charles Mann’s interests and related publications. This is the passage which relates to Nigerian Pidgin:
[...] he has undertaken research on Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (or “Nigerian Pidgin English“) - an endogenous Atlantic pidgin, which evolved from contacts between Portuguese sailors (15th century), then British traders and colonizers (18th century), and the natives of the multiple tribes on the southern coastlines of present-day Nigeria.
At the moment, the research focus is on attitudes of various socio-occupational groups to ANP in six urban centres in Southern Nigeria. This is probably the first attitudes survey of this magnitude ever conducted on a pidgin.
(www.surrey.ac.uk/ELI/ricm.html)
Due to its briefness, the information given is not necessarily useful, but at least the visitor to this home page learns about the existence of a current research project. “Roots of Identity“ and “SILEWP 1996-003“ are two well-written articles, but neither of them is about Nigerian Pidgin! The first is a research grant proposal advanced by Sali Tagliamonte who conducted a sociolinguistic investigation of English spoken in the city of York and environs in North East England, the latter was a paper about the creole languages of Surinam in which the term “Nigerian Pidgin English“ only appeared in the references. To sum up, although Inference Find queried three additional search engines that I did not use for this study, namely WebCrawler, Lycos and InfoSeek, the new documents it came up with were a far cry from being spectacular. Moreover, it missed for example the Journal of African Music and Popular Culture pages, the Creolist Archives pages and the information brochure I talked about in chapter 3.2.1.1. As for the presentation of the list, there are improvements and drawbacks: I welcome the idea to distinguish educational institution sites from commercial sites, which is very useful for some queries, but I miss the descriptions that most search engines supplement in addition to the titles, because sometimes they can help you to decide whether the document is worthwhile.
3.3 Other Starting Points
3.3.1 Starting from a Quality Link Site
I would now like to turn your attention to another quite effective approach to finding material. Try to find a quality link site, that is a Web site with excellent hyperlinks to other sites that relate to your topic. If you have not heard of any, try out a subject directory first. The subject directory Yahoo! offers a short, yet quite useful list of pidgin-related links. To see it, you may click through to Contact_Languages via Social_Science, Linguistics and Human Languages, Languages, and Language Groups, or you access this page directly by entering dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_
Languages/Languages/Language_Groups/Contact_Languages into the address field. This list of links presents both sites on specific languages such as Kreyol and general sites. For my research purposes, I concentrated on the latter. The links as of March 1999 were the following: Creolist Archives (www.ling.su.se/Creole), Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (www.siu.edu/departments/cola/ling), Pidgins and Creoles (logos.uoregon.edu/
explore/socioling/pidgin.html) and Reference Guide for Pidgin and Creole Languages (aldus.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/pidgins/pidgin.html). A user-friendly property of Yahoo!’s list of links is that it compiles only educational institution sites, and no commercial or shopping sites. With more popular topics this will be different, of course.
The first link that I tried out was the Creolist Archives, because the extra information “devoted to the study of pidgins, creoles and other contact languages“ sounded very promising. It is an educational site, maintained by linguistics from Stockholm University. We already came across various Creolist Archives pages by using search tools. The contents of the Creolist Archives is arranged by several sections. Examples: The “Creolist Calendar“ is a bulletin board announcing upcoming conferences and other events of interest to creolists. The “New Books“ section keeps the visitors up to date with recent books and journal issues, informs about recent books and forthcoming releases, and provides information on publishers of creolist literature.
Moreover, the Creolist Archives editors claim to offer the most extensive collection of Web sites of relevance to pidgin and creole studies, which they promise to update regularly. It consequently serves as an excellent starting point for conducting research on this subject area. You might want to click on “Creolist Links“ first. Following this link will take you to a number of good general and more specific links. For “Nigeria“ it provided links we already came across: „Universal Declaration of Human Rights“, „Some pidgin sayings and their translations“ and „Pidgin Vs. Rotten English in Soyinka and Saro-Wiwa.“
Furthermore, the Creolist Archives supplies the e-mail addresses and links to home pages of most of those working in the area of contact linguistics today, as well as links to creole institutions, societies, clubs etc. A particularly interesting feature for novices at this field is the FAQ file, which stands for Frequently Asked Questions. FAQs are maintained by many newsgroups and reading them is often very informative. A well-written FAQ is a wonderful starting point. Even if it does not answer your questions directly, an FAQ is likely to contain pointers to further collections of information found on other online resources. Bryan Pfaffenberger even maintains that “FAQs usually contain more up-to-date information than books, and more practical information than magazines.“ (Pfaffenberger 223). Large collections of FAQs are available at www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/top.html and www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/news.
To see the FAQ of the Creolist Archives go to www.ling.su/se/Creole/FAQ-Creole.html. Here you are given authoritative answers to sixteen questions such as “What is Creolistics?“, “What is the difference between a pidgin and a creole?“, “Are pidgins and creoles “real“ languages?“, “Are there any good beginner’s books on pidgin and creole languages?“ and “Are there any good Web sites devoted to pidgin and creole languages?“
On its “Aim and Scope“ page, the visitor is told that the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages is “designed to be part of an international effort to bring together scholarly treatments of all aspects of pidginization and creolization. Special emphasis is laid on the presentation of the results of current research in theory and description of pidgin and creole languages, and application of this knowledge to language planning, education, and social reform in creole-speaking societies“. The Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages offers among other things article abstracts of past and forthcoming issues. However, if you want to see an article in its entirety, you still have to look for the paper version. The editors consequently turn the online visitors’ attention to the possibility of subscribing to the journal. The glossary offers concise explanations of terms such as decreolization and monogenesis and is helpful for the novices at this discipline. In my opinion, the drawbacks of the site are that the abstracts and summaries supplied are not really usable for online searchers and that the site provides no hyperlinks to other research sources.
Another item included in Yahoo!’s link site is a single Web page titled “Pidgins and Creoles“. This page is hosted by the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon. It gives a brief introduction to the definition and development of pidgins, as well as some sample sentences from various pidgins/creoles. This page is far from being complete, but serves as a basic reader that provides a good general overview.
Last but not least, I would like to say a few things about the “Reference Guide for Pidgin and Creole Languages“, hosted by the Stanford Department of Linguistics. This page lists all the material on Pidgin and Creole Studies that is owned by the department. The links it offers include The Creolist Archives, the glossary from the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages I mentioned above, the French-language Institut d'Etudes Créoles et Francophones (http://www.superdoc.com/aidel/iecf) and the electronic version of the Ethnologue (www.sil.org/ethnologue), which basically contains the entire text of the original printed volume, and is thus fully useful for the online searcher.
According to its home page, the Ethnologue is “a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages spoken in 228 countries. The Ethnologue Name Index lists over 39,000 language names, dialect names, and alternate names. The Ethnologue Language Family Index organizes languages according to language families.“ I have already discussed the data about the linguistic situation in Nigeria in chapter 3.2.1.1.
A highly recommendable feature is the Ethnologue’s “Top 100 Languages by Population“ table at www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html. According to these figures, the most widely spoken languages are Mandarin (885 million speakers), Spanish (332m) and English (322m). German is ranked 9 (98m), French 13 (72m) and Cantonese 16 (66m). The only creole language that made it to the “Top 100“ is Haitian Creole French in 99th place with between seven and eight million first language speakers. A click on the language name allowed me to view the Ethnologue entry, which brought more more detailed data regarding the number of speakers and, perhaps more important, some sources.
3.3.2 Online Discussion Groups
3.3.2.1 Newsgroups
Newsgroups convey an enormous amount of information, good and bad. They allow network users to discuss certain subjects with each other. Each newsgroup concerns itself with a particular subject and can be used for questions and answers, suggestions and the publication of relevant texts, etc. This part of the Internet is called Usenet. It is a global community of computer users who communicate information using an online bulletin board. You can search Usenet for information on topics of interest to you, browse them, or add to a bulletin board by posting a message to it. According to Reference.com, “Over 250,000 messages are posted to Usenet each day and millions of people around the world read it. Typically, users post questions and the Usenet community responds - exchanging everything from artichoke soup recipes to tips on installing a Web server.“ If you want to see messages of a newsgroup that you know, you can directly enter its name into the address field, e.g. news: soc.culture.nigeria. In April 1999, there were more than 8,000 messages posted in this newsgroup. It should not be left unmentioned that many Usenet contributions are written by biased and/or ignorant people. Always be critical and try to find other sources that back up the first author’s statements.
There are at least 20,000 newsgroups at present, and their number is still growing (cf. Kjaer 40). The groups are organized in a tree structure which has eight major categories: comp (topics of interest to both computer professionals and hobbyists), rec (groups oriented towards hobbies and recreational activities), sci (science), soc (cultural and social subjects), talk (debate-oriented groups), news (about Usenet itself), misc (anything that cannot be easily classified) and alt (“alternative“ subjects, e.g. alt.bible.prophesy, alt.impeachment.clinton and alt.sex.necrophilia).
One way to find newsgroups are the links on the World Wide Web. For instance, when you search for a particular topic on a subject directory such as Yahoo!, you will be given relevant newsgroups as a result, provided there is one. There is no privacy in newsgroups, as all contributions are archived at for instance www.dejanews.com, which claims to be “the only Web site where you can read, search, participate in and subscribe to more than 80,000 discussion forums, including Usenet newsgroups.“ In principle, the whole world, including your family and your boss, can read what you send to a newsgroup.
On 22 March 1999, DejaNews retrieved 78,000 matches for “sex“, but only 77 matches for “pidgins OR creoles“, 7 matches for “pidgins AND creoles“ , and 8 matches by six different authors for “nigerian pidgin“. Although none of these eight documents had Nigerian Pidgin as their actual subject, two messages proved to be somewhat useful for this study. The author of the first one is Mobolaji E. Aluko, and he reported on the BBC programs in English and Hausa throughout Nigeria. He took the view that “[w]hile the use of English and Hausa are justified, the use of only those two languages is not. Pidgin should certainly be justified, followed by Yoruba and Igbo“, arguing that Nigerian Pidgin is the popular tongue in some of the biggest cities, including Port Hartcourt and Benin city. This is supported by what Ganja Ekeh wrote in his e-mail: “ In Benin city, also in the mid west (where the pidgin forward-thinkers seem to be in abundance) the evening news is read in every language of the state, then finally in pidgin. Many t.v. shows are based on pidgin.“
Since Aluko’s e-mail address carried the extension edu, contacting him appeared worthwhile. In his reply, he introduced himself as a professor of chemical engineering at Howard University in Washington, D. C. He doubted that any of his compatriots consider Pidgin as their first language: “But there must be up to 10 million Nigerians who speak Pidgin frequently, and another 20 million who understand it but use it infrequently. These are guesses.“
The other message that is of some interest to this study was posted by Adey Oyenuga, who introduced himself as Prince Adey. This message was useful in that it was entirely written in Nigerian Pidgin. Here is an abstract: “Chei, man pikin just dey dance to your tune oo... Na jently our blood brodaman dey sit for him hut before you come force am for public o. Chei, I still can’t believe the man dey try to “sneak“ back in di Village Square without even acknowledging his brodas. Chineke !!“
Oyenuga was kind enough to send me a translation: “Wow, I am just following in your footsteps. Our beloved brother was minding his own business before you forced him out into the public arena. Wow, I still cannot believe that he was trying to sneak back into the [Naijanet] Forum without even extending his greetings to us. My Lord!!“ Oyenuga wrote the above message in Pidgin to show the audience that it was meant humorously. He added: “Some people use Pidgin English for other reasons such as:
- Connecting with only Nigerians.
- Sending a message between the lines.
- To show off.
- To let others know that you haven’t forgotten your root.“
Oyenuga went on to point out that there are various forms of Pidgin English in Nigeria, each influenced by the native language of its speakers, and that there exists, however, also a universal variety that everybody in Nigeria understands. He wondered how I obtained a copy of the message that was meant only for Naijanet, a mailing list for discussing Nigerian issues. Obviously, he was not aware of DejaNews and the lack of privacy on the Internet.
Due to the unreviewed contributions, the large majority of Usenet messages on any given topic are not helpful at all. Often, messages do not deal with what their titles suggest, others end with the words “Believe it or not, no proof available“. Worse still, some authors fail to adhere to the so-called netiquette, which are guidelines for good behavior on the Internet. Instead, they abuse the Usenet by sending trite, false or even aggressive e-mails. Abusive messages are called flames, and they can result in flame wars, when an online discussion degenerates into a series of personal attacks against the debaters, rather than a fruitful discussion of their positions.
However, DejaNews’ “Power Search“, which for example finds also some older messages, retrieved the most valuable article “The National Language Issue: A Revisit“ by Tagliamonte’s collaborator Ejike Eze. If you are lucky, you might find it still archived at x11.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN
=153182710&CONTEXT=922959859.680526041&hitnum=31. Since I doubt it, I include a relatively extensive excerpt:
The amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria in 1914 by the British colonial administrators lumped together people of diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds into what has now become the Federal Republic of Nigeria. With over four hundred mutually unintelligible linguistic groupings (according to Ayo Bamgbose, one Nigeria’s foremost linguists) Nigeria epitomizes a Babelic scenario. [...] the adoption of a national language for Nigeria, and indeed any multilingual society, is a volatile issue. Several proposals were considered for Nigeria. The most widely debated is the adoption of one of the three major languages (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) as the national language. The problem, of course, became determining the criteria for adopting one over the others.
The second alternative was to create an artificial national language for Nigeria. Wazobia, a concatenation of Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, was an excellent idea and a lot of fuss was made about it in the media. But in reality, Wazobia faced a lot of insurmountable problems. First, it was far from being developed and the linguists who could work towards its developments were too cynical to bond their efforts towards this goal. Second, it further marginalizes the minorities. If a hybrid language is to be adopted it might as well incorporate most of the existing languages. This was not practicable. Third, a language requires a zealous population to propagate it and Wazobia had none. But perhaps the greatest impediment to the growth of Wazobia was the fact that it was not an emergency and Nigerians had a choice, English the language of the colonial masters. Thus, Wazobia stood no chance.
Apart from the three major languages, another candidate for national language status is the Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE). Not only is it considered a language of solidarity, it is considered a neutral language. Ayo Bamgbose, however, points out the major drawbacks of NPE as a national language. First, its language development status is almost non-existent since there are neither serious books nor a standard orthography. Second, just like Wazobia, there is no large population to back it up. Even though it is the unofficial language of the armed forces and the police and is popular in coastal areas and urban centers, it is virtually unknown in large areas of the country. Third, it is likely to be unacceptable to the majority of the people who argue that English might as well be retained rather than replacing it with an English-based pidgin, much like going from the frying pan into the fire.
It is then this difficulty in choosing an indigenous language as the official language that has resulted in the continued existence of English as the official language of education and administration in Nigeria long after the colonial circumstances that gave rise to it has been dismantled. English is considered to be acceptable as an official language by many because of its neutrality. Therefore, most people would rather we let the sleeping giant lie [...].
One option that has never been considered to the best of my knowledge is the adoption of the three official languages. As unusual as this option sounds, it has its advantages. First, the three languages are highly developed. Second, each has a solid population to back it up. Third, each is spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities. Finally, the maintenance of more than one official language works for many countries of the world [...].
While newsgroup messages are almost always short, personal and little informative, this article is the famous exception to the rule. I wonder why Eze did not post his article, which, as he told me, was not meant to be an academic paper, as an HTML document on a server so that the spiders could index it more easily and by that make his article available to a much larger audience.
Reference.com (www.reference.com) is another searchable directory, which even has an index of more than 100,000 mailing lists. About this additional service, Reference.com says: “We have also subscribed to many of those lists (subject to being granted permission by the list owners), so you can search the postings to those lists just as you can search Usenet postings.“ To my great disappointment, searching for Wole Soyinka on Reference.com retrieved only 5 hits, and searching for Nigerian Pidgin no hit at all.
3.3.2.2 Mailing Lists
Mailing lists are similar to Usenet, except that instead of having messages posted to a bulletin board, the messages are delivered directly into the subscribers’ electronic mailboxes. Kjaer outlines the main differences between newsgroups and mailing lists:
Old messages in newsgroups are deleted automatically. This means it is sometimes difficult to follow a discussion if you did not see how it started. On a mailing list the old messages are not deleted. They just stay in your mailbox, and you can decide yourself when you will read them and when you will delete them [...]. Furthermore, some mailing lists are controlled, meaning that someone has read all articles before they are sent out. This means that your mailbox will not be filled up with irrelevant messages that have nothing to do with the subject. (Kjaer 44)
Mailing lists are lists of e-mail addresses of people who are interested in a particular subject, and can therefore be another useful research source. If you send your letter to a mailing list, it will automatically be sent out to every participant on the list. And you will receive all the mails that other members have sent in to this list. What happens is that the person who has written a message sends it to the mailing list’s address and then a program there forwards it to everybody on the list. There a several very similar administrative programs, the most common of which is called LISTSERV.
The Linguist List (listserv.linguistlist.org) is a project that provides links to linguistics discussion lists. The maintainer of this Web site points out that:
There are over 100 language-related discussion lists on the Internet, each of them carrying information valuable to other academic linguists. But most of us do not know what lists are available or how to find them. Nor is accessing past discussions always easy. Many lists do not have searchable archives. Many others flourish for a time but die when their owners lose interest or institutional support; and the valuable information they carried disappears with them. (listserv.linguistlist.org/service.html)
There used to be two mailing lists for creolists. The first was maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, but that was discontinued many months ago, I was told upon inquiry by Evans L. Antworth from the SIL organization. The other one, started in the beginning of February 1997, is maintained by the Creolist Archives (cf. chapter 3.3.1) and called CreoLIST. According to its own data, it had “somewhat more than 400 members“ in March 1999. The objective of this mailing list is:
[...] to serve as a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas and views on language restructuring. The focus will be on pidgins and creoles, but discussion on topics such as semi-creoles, koinés, intertwined languages, and other contact languages is also welcome. Relevant facts about the languages involved in the formation of these also fall within the scope of the list, as do discussions regarding psycho- and sociolinguistic aspects of such languages. Anthropological and other matters are welcome provided that they have some relevance to the linguistic discussion. (www.ling.su.se/Creole/CreoLIST/Index.html
#What)
I first discovered this mailing list by browsing the Creolist Archives Web site. Of course, you could also consult a search engine by entering for example “mailing list“ AND creole into the search box. The subscribers to the mailing list contribute messages on a variety of contact languages and aspects. The latest postings are available at listserv.linguist.org/archives/creolist.html.
One posting on Nigerian Pidgin, sent in by Jeff Allen in August 1998, informed about some related publications: “Someone on the CreoList brought up Nigerian Pidgin English and “broken English“ a couple of weeks ago. Since I have not seen much on Nigerian PE over the years but just came across several references to it a couple of days ago, I thought I might share them with everyone in case someone might be interested.“ This example shows us that mailing lists can be valuable research sources in some cases. As each posting is accompanied by the contributor’s e-mail address, it is theoretically possible to get into contact with him or her in order to obtain more details. People write to inform the others of current projects, upcoming conferences and workshops, new books, new Web sites and so forth. Joining a mailing list is usually very helpful if you want to keep track of current research projects and the latest findings. Here another example, taken from the LINGUIST List, a mailing list that discusses more general linguistic issues. The message was written by a linguist in his capacity as a refugee counselor and introduces some new aspects:
Many Liberian, Sierra-Leonese and Nigerian refugees come to the Netherlands to seek asylum. To verify their origin, the Dutch immigration authorities question these people thoroughly in English, while many West-Africans in fact speak a pidgin or creole. Miscommunications occur and, as a result, asylum requests are unrightfully rejected. Since the future of many people is at stake, I want to provide the legal bar with an essay in which the following claims are defended:
1. Both lexical and grammatical differences between English and West-African English-lexifier pidgins/creoles can cause misunderstandings that are not necessarily noticed by the speakers themselves. For instance, Nigerian Pidgin English “yellow“ means “white“.
2. When the questioning is in a pidgin/creole, it should be in the right one. In West-Africa, many varieties exist and mutual intelligibility is limited.
3. When a pidgin/creole speaker maintains that there is no language problem, this is sociolinguistically explicable. In West-Africa, the distinction between English and pidgin/creole is not always known, and a good command of English is a matter of prestige.
I am looking for material (facts, anecdotes, publications) that could support these claims, and that could help make them comprehensible to non-linguists. Any suggestion will be welcome, but what I need most is information on intelligibility since the literature is particularly unclear in this respect. Needless to say, full credits will be given to anyone whose information is used.
(linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-1795.html)
The two above messages illustrate the usefulness of mailing lists, both for the professionals and the interested parties. Summarizing we can say that, since you have to subscribe to a list before you are allowed to make contributions, that is before your message will be distributed, and since messages are often edited by the list owners and in a way reviewed by the other subscribers to the list (mails containing personal abuse may lead to the exclusion from the list), mailing lists are usually more efficient for research purposes than newsgroups. In the next chapter, I would like to present the recent discussion on CreoLIST about the advantages and dangers of online publishing.
3.3.2.3 Re: Online Publishing
One of the liveliest discussions in April 1999 among several subscribers to the CreoLIST happened to be of prime interest for this study. Some people outlined the disadvantages of traditional publishing and argued in favor of online publishing, others discussed the inherent problems of the latter. George Huttar started the discussion by addressing the high costs of books on creole languages, which are “priced far beyond the reach of nearly all speakers of the languages concerned“. His suggestion is to publish through cheaper outlets. Chris Corne followed up the discussion by pointing out that: “A book published in the UK or the USA has more prestige on a CV than one published here [in New Zealand]. What a lot of publishers do, is they get the printing and binding done in, say, Hong Kong, and publish officially in say New York.“ In response to that, Eric Schiller argues that:
The problem is one of our own creation, or rather of the academic linguistic community. There is absoulutely no excuse for the publication situation. All relevant information should be on the web [...]. Since I work outside academia, I can do what I want, and except for conference papers, I do ALL my writing on my website. Why on earth should I hold up dissemination of ideas for years waiting for a book to appear, which no one can afford anyway?
However, as George Huttar justifiably points out, we should not forget that the vast majority of the world’s population have no access to the necessary technology. John McWhorter supports Schiller by providing an example of the “absurd lag time academics make do with“: “A paper I wrote as a graduate student, before I even wrote my dissertation, appeared only last year in an anthology, no longer representative of my research or thoughts, but sure to be cited in the future as if it were the sum of my ideas on the subject.“ Jeff Allen, a more critical proponent of the Internet, calls our attention to the copyright issue:
One of the current trends among many researchers, and others, at the moment is that the idea that anything available on the web is downloadable, usable, and is not copyrighted material. [...]. What about the producers of the original data? Is their copyright being respected? Are royalties (compensation for the work that they put into their article, database, etc.) being paid? Are the authors being credited for the work that they have already done, or is the Internet a simple so-called “public domain“ excuse to plagiarize publicly accessible data and documentation?
The enforcement of the copyright is naturally even more difficult when people do not steal exact wordings, but ideas. In this context, peer review (cf. chapter 2.3.2) offers two advantages at the same time: It ensures that the published material is worthwhile and makes it difficult for other researchers to steal texts from the reviewed articles or books. I would very much appreciate peer review on the Web to establish some sort of quality control. The two major obstacles are, as with so many things in life, the costs involved and the time needed. Vincent de Rooij even feels that the lack of time/money is the only reason why scholars still hesitate to do online publishing following the established procedures of print publications. Jens Edlund, the webmaster of the CreoLIST, however, thinks that the loss of prestige mentioned by Corne is the most problematic aspect of online publishing. In his view, the solution to the CV/prestige problem is to raise the prestige of online publishing by introducing peer review and to overcome the prejudice against the Web among the scholars themselves: “The goal of research, to find things out about the world, would surely benefit greatly from a larger and faster exchange of knowledge, ideas and, last but certainly not least, material. This should be kept in mind when calculating the costs.“
Another problem that Allen addresses is the location problem:
Sure, it makes the information more accessible [...], but it also creates a situation in which the data gets lost in what I refer to as the information saturation matrix. In other words, the paper or article gets thrown in with everything else for a search engine to look for but this does not mean necessarily that it is gets discovered. [...]. You normally just look at the first 5 [documents], unless you are persistent and/or have the time to spend linking to each individual page. In order to avoid dealing with the information saturation matrix/ocean, I have carefully studied the syntax necessary to optimally use such search engines [...]. But most people I know do not spend their time studying and devising search strategies to optimize their searches, and thus reduce the Web page hits. So, much of the information remains untapped in pages 6- 50 in their Internet searches.
The situation depicted by Allen demonstrates what this paper is preaching: Familiarizing oneself with the Internet is essential for efficient searches! I also like Edlund’s idea to set up a Web site that covers all creolistics-related articles. As he rightly points out, this field is “just about right, sizewise, to lend itself to a comprehensive listing of available materials in one spot/database.“ Reviewing all field-related documents and indexing them in one searchable database would mean the solution to many of the currently existing problems touched upon in this paper, such as source verification and finding relevant material. Apart from very generous sponsors, this would require people who are willing to devote their time to it and who have the necessary editorial and webmaster skills.
3.3.3 Contacting Experts
As we have seen in the chapter on meta-search engines, it is often more effective to contact experts than browsing the Internet for hours or even days, not knowing whether you will find a satisfactory answer in the end. One of the questions that apparently no Web page knows the answer to is the number of (first language) speakers of Nigerian Pidgin. Even Barbara Grimes, the editor of the Ethnologue, told me that she had no estimates for Nigerian Pidgin. Mikael Parkvall, the editor of the Creolist Archives, advised me to ask Sali Tagliamonte or Charles Mann.
As we noted earlier, the Creolist Archives offers a searchable directory of scholars active in the field of contact linguistics. This special service is directly accessible at www.ling.su.se/Creole/Addresslist.shtml. You can type the name of the creolist you want to get in contact with, and also see a full listing. The list contains the e-mail addresses and links to the home pages of “most of those working in the area of contact linguistics today“. In order to be included on the list, you just have to drop the editor an e-mail message. Well-known creolists on this list include Dell Hymes and John Holm. Using this directory enabled me to find out the e-mail addresses and Web pages of Sali Tagliamonte and Charles Mann. As for Nicholas G. Faraclas, I only got to know his “conventional“ mailing address (often humorously called snail mail address) in Papua New Guinea.
Even for Mann, a well-known creolist and of British/Nigerian origin himself, the question how many people speak Nigerian Pidgin is difficult to answer: “I’m not sure anyone can tell you how many people speak it as a first language, etc., since no survey has been carried out, as far as I know. What I can say, though, is that it is most used as most people’s third language in most urban centres in southern Nigeria. I also believe it is spoken by more people than speak English (in Nigeria). I have, consequently, called it the primary inter-ethnic lingua franca in urban, southern Nigeria.“ Mann favors the term Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin for two main reasons: “a) it is not the only pidgin in Nigeria. [...] b) the more well-known term for it is “Nigerian Pidgin English“, which, in my view, is also a misnomer, in that it gives the impression it is a type of English, whereas English only really provides most of the lexicon, which is phonetologically transformed, according to local linguistic patterns. “Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin“ highlights more simply its type of origin, and main contributory languages.“ (Mann in his e-mail from March 26, 1999).
I asked Ejike Eze to defend the term “Nigerian Pidgin English“ and received the following answer: “[The term Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin] is based on the assumption that the pidgin is English-based. But my work with Poplack and Tagliamonte over the years have demonstrated that the underlying structure of the Nigerian Pidgin English mirrors the local languages. English only provides the lexical items, if that. So, it would be incorrect to talk about anglo-nigerian pidgin if we are using the term to refer to the NPE.“ (Eze in his e-mail from April 26, 1999). It seems that there is some kind of misunderstanding between the two parties.
As I mentioned earlier, I have not heard of any Nigerians who consider Nigerian Pidgin as their first language or mother tongue. The reason is that the people, regardless of how often they employ pidgin, remain native speakers of Igbo, Yoruba, etc. Tagliamonte’s reply clearly supports this notion: “No Nigerians I’ve ever asked would claim it is his/her first language. Ejike Eze always used to tell me that it was more like a diglossia situation for him. There was never a time when he can remember not speaking NPE, but it is not his first language.“ (Tagliamonte in her e-mail from March 29, 1999)
We can now safely assume that no survey has been carried out so far to find out the numbers of first language speakers for Nigerian Pidgin, and so all figures that you might come across must be estimates. Unfortunately, I was not able to get hold of Faraclas to ask him on what sources he based his claim that there are more than one million first language speakers. This is actually no real setback, as I can imagine his reply. In all probability, he based his estimate on the data he collected from interviews with Nigerians. In the introduction to his book “Nigerian Pidgin“ he states that in order to obtain the data sample, “tape recordings of conversations, story-telling sessions and other relatively casual interactions were made in several working-class compounds, market stalls, industrial plants, drinking parlours, etc., in urban Port Hartcourt from July 1985 to February 1986.“ It would, however, be interesting to learn how many of his interviewees considered Nigerian Pidgin as their mother tongue. As Magnus Huber points out, “[...] this has to be seen in the West African context: very few West Africans learn only one language as a child, especially in urban contexts. So I find it quite imaginable that children learn Pidgin at the same time as their “mother tongue“ (Huber in his e-mail from April 2, 1999)
Finally, I would like to turn your attention to “Sali Tagliamonte’s Home Page“ at www-users.york.ac.uk/~st17, because it is of particular interest for this case study. It contains a brief outline of her “Nigerian Pidgin English Project“:
In 1993 we began another phase in this research program with the collaboration of a Nigerian graduate student, Ejike Eze. The fruits of Eze’s participant observation in his own social networks in the Nigerian Community in Ottawa led to the addition of a data set of Nigerian Pidgin English. In contrast to the results of our continuing research on the previous three varieties, Nigerian Pidgin English is widely-held to exhibit typically “creole“ features. If this is true, then it should demonstrate entirely different patterns and processes than those found in Samana English, the Ex-Slave Recordings or African Nova Scotian English. Thus, this corpus provides us with yet another piece to the puzzle of resolving the controversy over the origins and development of and its relationship to Creoles and varieties of English, both contemporary and historical.
Tagliamonte’s home page is logically structured, beautifully written, and provides a good overview of her research projects rather than emphasizing her qualifications. This makes it a quality site. I especially appreciate her last sentence “Please feel free to contact me about anything you read here!“ Many other home pages are mere lists of publications and honors.
Even though the informative quality of home pages differ widely, visiting some of them can be quite interesting. For instance, I was not aware that Loreto Todd, the co-author of the book “Variety in Contemporary English“ was a woman until I saw her picture in her home page at www.leeds.ac.uk/english/$staff/todd.html. Another example: Parkvall’s home page at www.ling.su.se/staff/parkvall is only available in Swedish. In his e-mail from March 8, 1999, he gives “political reasons“ for this: “Americans and English-speaking peoples in general are so bloody arrogant that they usually ignore that there are people in the world who are not English-speaking. Since I don’t really have anything to say on my home page in any case, I might as well do it in a language other than English just to show that I’m not American (which many people actually seem to believe).“
The Internet is a rich information storehouse that enables 24-hour-a-day access to valuable data from anywhere in the world. It often provides more up-to-date information than books, which is especially true with news concerning this fast-changing medium itself. It has become clear that there is much more to the Internet than just composing e-mails and doing simple key word searches. The more familiar you are with all of the various Internet services, the more will you be able to benefit from them. I have examined different ways to gather research material and discovered that using the advanced search tools can significantly cut down your search time and that newsgroups and mailing lists provide wonderful opportunities to exchange views with all kinds of people, including leading experts. Besides, FAQs, often ignored or forgotten by Internet searchers, are terrific starting points for researches.
You are not likely to discover a comprehensive grammar of Nigerian Pidgin on the Web, so it should not serve as your exclusive method of research. But the Internet is excellent for finding the kind of information that is usually excluded from academic papers such as the report of the refugee counselor. These extra data are the spices, so to speak.
When it comes to supplying authentic speech samples, the Internet clearly outperforms any scientific paper. By contacting specialists and fluent speakers of Nigerian Pidgin via e-mail I obtained valuable first-hand material. I was given much interesting and pertinent information that helped me to evaluate certain Web sites, as well as general support.
Until now only few experts have made their articles available on the Web, almost all of which are to be found on educational institution sites. This will undoubtedly change in the near future. As Eric Schiller emphasized at one point in the discussion on online publishing: “[...] we need information, and we need to share information. It is in the best interest of our community to get as much information as we can to the widest possible audience.“ I am confident that on the basis of give and take the Internet will become an indispensable research source and discussion forum for just about everybody - professionals, students, businesspeople, consumers, translators, you name it.
1. Pidgins and Creoles
Arends, Jacques/Muysken, Pieter/Smith, Norval (eds.). Pidgins and Creoles: an introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1994/5.
Bourhis, Richard Y. “Le monde de la Francophonie.“ Ryan/Giles.
DeCamp, David. “Introduction: The Study of Pidgins and Creole Languages“. Hymes 13-39.
DeCamp, David/Hancock, Ian F. (eds.). Pidgins and Creoles. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1974.
Edwards, John R. “Language attitudes and their implications among English speakers.“ Attitudes towards Language Variation. Ryan/Giles.
Eze, Ejike. “The National Language Issue: A Revisit.“ URL: x11.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=153182710&CONTEXT=922959859.680526041&hitnum=31, 1996.
Faraclas, Nicholas G. Nigerian Pidgin. London: Routledge, 1996.
Greenberg, Jonathan R. “Pidgin Vs. Rotten English in Soyinka and Saro-Wiwa.“ URL: stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/sarowiwa
/pidgin.html, 1994.
Hall, Jr., Robert A. Pidgins and Creole Languages. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1966.
Hall, Jr., Robert A. “Pidgins.“ The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. XXII. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1986.
Hansen, Klaus/Carls, Uwe/Lucko, Peter. Die Differenzierung des Englischen in nationale Einheiten. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1996.
Holm, John. Pidgins and Creoles. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Hymes, Dell (ed.). Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Kachru, Braj B. “Norms, Models, and Identities.“ URL: langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/96/oct/englishes.htm, 1996.
O’Donnell, W.R./Todd, Loreto. Variety in Contemporary English. London: Routledge, 1991.
Ryan, Ellen Bouchard/Giles, Howard (eds.). Attitudes towards Language Variation. London: Arnolds, 1982.
Sautter, Ursula. “Auf Wiedersehen, English.“ TIME 16 November, 1998.
Stoll, Karl-Heinz. “Black English.“ Ars transferendi: Sprache, Übersetzung, Interkulturalität. Huber, Dieter/Worbs, Erika (eds). Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1998.
Todd, Loreto. Pidgins and Creoles. London: Routledge, 1992.
Wardhaugh, Ronald. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. IV + IX. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1986.
2. The Internet
Alexander, Steve. “Computers and Information Systems.“ 1997 Britannica Book of the Year. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1997.
Budiansky, Stephen. “Lost in Translation.“ The Atlantic Monthly December 1998.
Cerf, Vint. “A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks.“ URL: www.isoc.org/internet-history/cerf/html, 1997.
Christ, J./Günzel, C./Schneider, I. “Fit fürs Internet.“ Focus 6/1999.
Cohen, Laura. “Quick Reference Guide to Search Engine Syntax.“ URL: www.albany.edu/library/internet/syntax.html, 1999.
Kjaer, Torben. Get going with the Internet. New York: SoEasy!, 1998.
Kunz, Martin. “Informationsrecherche im Internet.“ URL: www.fask.uni-mainz.de/inst/chinesisch/recherche.html, 1998.
Pfaffenberger, Bryan. Web Search Strategies. New York: MIS:Press, 1996.
Selnow, Gary W. Electronic Whistle-Stops: The Impact of the Internet on American Politics.Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1998.
Strittmatter, Kai. “Zensur durch Chinas
Cyber-Polizei.“ Süddeutsche Zeitung 21 January, 1999.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to all the
people who contributed to the successful completion of this dissertation.
These people include experts in linguistics and computer science. Special
thanks to Professor Stoll of the University of Mainz who encouraged me to
undertake this study and guided it to its completion. This paper is dedicated
to my mother who has sacrificed much of her life to bring me up as a
self-reliant, open-minded and responsable individual.
Annotations:
The 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains a total of 616,500 word forms (290,500 main entries and 326,000 combinations and derivatives).
Examples taken from Hansen 185/6
Hymes and DeCamp suggest that Chinese Pidgin might be still in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan (cf. Hymes 102-113), yet we can safely assume that it has become extinct by now. The growing importance of Mandarin and English in both territories makes the use of any pidgin superfluous and ridiculous.
The figures for the various languages in Nigeria usually fluctuate between 200 and 400. The Ethnologue even lists 471 living languages. This mainly depends on the respective definition of language. It is worth noticing that the Chinese languages are often wrongly termed dialects, although they are all mutually unintelligible and differ not only in pronunciation, but also in lexicon and grammar. It is more adequate to speak of a Chinese group of languages (which comprises Mandarin, Cantonese and six other languages), analogous to the concept of for example Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.).
With the decolonization struggles by black Africa in the post WW II years, newly independent African states were confronted with populations that were linguistically, culturally and tribally heterogeneous. While the black elites of these new nations had been educated in the capitals of Europe where they learned either French, English or Portuguese, the African masses spoke an impressive array of diverse languages and dialects, none of which on its own could compete with the European colonial languages. The black elites of post-colonial Africa believed that nation building could be best achieved through the adoptation of a single national language. Ironically, the adoptation of the colonial language as the official language of these emerging nations had the double advantage of avoiding potential inter-ethnic conflicts while facilitating modernization through technology and international communication (cf. Bourhis 48).
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) changed its name to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971, then back to ARPA in 1993, and back to DARPA in 1996.
Koinés are usually made up of several dialects of the same language, often relying heavily on one dominant dialect. They are characterized by expansion in role, e. g. Standard Macedonian (cf. Britannica, Volume 6, page 933).
The term diglossia refers to the coexistence of two forms of the same language in a speech community. Often one form is the literary or prestige dialect, and the other is a common dialect spoken by most of the population. Sometimes, it also refers to the speaking of two or more languages of the same community, as, for instance, in New York City, where many members of the Hispanic community speak both Spanish and English, switching from one to the other according to the social situation (cf. Britannica, Volume 4, page 93).
Letzte Bearbeitung/last updated/dernière mis en jour/última actualización: 2000/07/20