[3][4] It can be spoken as a pidgin, a creole, dialect or a decreolised acrolect by different speakers, who may switch between these forms depending on the social setting.
[5] Variations of what this article refers to as "Nigerian Pidgin" are also spoken across West and Central Africa, in countries such as Benin, Ghana, and Cameroon.
Pidgin breaks the communication barrier between different ethnic groups and it is widely spoken throughout Nigeria.
[7] Nigerian Pidgin is most widely spoken in the oil state Niger Delta where most of its population speak it as their first language.
[10] There are accounts of pidgin being spoken first in colonial Nigeria before being adopted by other countries along the West African coast.
Furthermore, the use of words of West African origin in Surinamese Creole (Sranan Tongo) and Jamaican Patois, such as unu and Bajan dialect wunna or una – West African Pidgin (meaning "you people", a word that comes from the Igbo word unu or unuwa also meaning "you people"), display some of the interesting similarities between the English pidgins and creoles of West Africa and the English pidgins and creoles of the Caribbean, as does the presence of words and phrases that are identical in the languages on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Me a go tell dem (I'm going to tell them) and make we (let us).
A copula deh or dey is found in both Caribbean Creole and Nigerian Pidgin English.
Other similarities, such as pikin (Nigerian Pidgin for "child") and pikney (used in islands like St.Vincent, Antigua and St. Kitts, akin to the standard-English pejorative/epithet pickaninny) and chook (Nigerian Pidgin for "poke" or "stab") which corresponds with the Trinidadian creole word juk, and also corresponds to chook used in other West Indian islands.
[19] Most written texts in Nigerian Pidgin do not show any tonal markings, and do not reflect any lexical pitch differences.