It is also spoken by a sizable community of people originating from Bioko in Bata, the largest town on the continental part of the country.

Pichi is believed to have derived from the Krio language, which first arrived in Bioko, the former Fernando Po, with African settlers from Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1827 (Fyfe 1962: 165).

No official figures exist, but there is good reason to assume that Pichi is today the second most widely spoken African language of the country behind Fang, closely followed by Bubi.

It is safe to assume that at least 100,000 people of the country's population of around one million[3] use Pichi regularly as a primary or secondary language.

As a consequence, Pichi was considered an impoverished, debased form of English by Spanish colonial administrators and missionaries.

[12] Throughout the better part of the 19th century, this community, which had emerged from the horrors of slavery and the slave trade, began to forge a vibrant African-European culture and economy along the West African seaboard.

From then onwards, Pichi was cut off from the direct influence of English, the language from which it inherited the largest part of its lexicon.

Equally, the burgeoning oil economy of Equatorial Guinea has led to increased urbanisation, extending multi-ethnic social networks and the spread of Pichi as a native language.

The consonant phonemes of Pichi are twenty-two: /p, b, t, d, tʃ, dʒ, k, ɡ, f, v, s, ʁ, h, m, n, ɲ, ŋ, l, w, j, kp, ɡb/.

Examples follow with the four possible tonal configurations for bisyllabic words:[17] The morphological structure of Pichi is largely isolating.

In the following example, tone alone distinguishes possessive from objective case of the 1SG personal pronoun: Dɛ̀n3PLtifstealmi1SG.EMPmì1SG.POSSsus.shoeDɛ̀n tif mi mì sus.3PL steal 1SG.EMP 1SG.POSS shoe'They stole my shoes from me.

Clause linkage is characterised by a large variety of strategies and forms, in which the subordinator we, the quotative marker se, and the two modal complementisers fɔ̀ and mek stand out as multifunctional elements with overlapping functions.