[8] A British slave trader in Sierra Leone, John Matthews, mentioned pidgin English in a letter he later published in a book titled A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa.
[9] Matthews refers to West African Pidgin English as a "jargon", and he warns Europeans coming to Africa that they will fail to understand the Africans unless they recognize that there are significant differences between English and the coastal pidgin: Those who visit Africa in a cursory manner ... are very liable to be mistaken in the meaning of the natives from want of knowledge in their language, or in the jargon of such of them as reside upon the sea-coast and speak a little English; the European affixing the same ideas to the words spoken by the African, as if they were pronounced by one of his own nation.
Looked down upon during the colonial era as a bastardization of proper English – a stigma still attached to it by some – Pidgin nonetheless remains in widespread use.
[12] Because West African Pidgin English is a primarily spoken language, there is no standardized written form, and many local varieties exist.
In Sierra Leone Krio, for instance, words derived from English regional dialects include padi ('friend'), krabit ('stingy'), and berin ('funeral').
Words from specialized ship vocabulary include kohtlas [from cutlass] ('machete'), flog ('beat, punish'), eys [from hoist] ('to lift'), and dek ('floor').
[citation needed] These contemporary English-based pidgin and creole languages are so similar that they are increasingly grouped together under the name "West African Pidgin English", although the term originally designated only the original trade language spoken on the West African coast two hundred years ago.
Their enslaved children born in the Americas would have adopted different versions of West African Pidgin English as their "native" languages, thus creating a series of New World English-based creoles.