STUDENT PIDGIN (SP): THE LANGUAGE OF THE EDUCATED MALE ELITE

This essay is about a language that apparently does not exist. It was spawned about thirty years ago and has developed into an extended pidgin, which will be referred to as Student Pidgin (SP), and which is spoken by male university students in Ghana's five universities and used nearly exclusively for their out-of-classroom communicative needs. Outside the educational institutions, WAP1 or GhaPE2 (Magnus Huber's term) plays a very minor role in Ghana's linguistic repertoire. SP is a WAP and therefore a variety of GhaPE. Huber's suggestion that it be regarded as the acrolectal manifestation of GhaPE will be accepted for the purposes of this paper - especially since it exhibits the same distinct features as GhaPE where the latter differs from the other WAPs. The completive don, for example, is not found in GhaPE nor in SP, nor is the copulative na found in either. In this paper GhaPE refers to pidgin that is spoken in town as opposed to SP, which is spoken primarily by male students on the secondary and tertiary campuses and also by the male products of these institutions (Dako: 1999).