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ABSTRACT
It has been established that Pidgin is a make-shift language used as a medium of communication by people who don't understand one another's language. It's a ready-made language that has become rampant and used by its speakers in their day-to-day mundane transactions and for other various purposes. A variant of pidgin can be described based on the area with which the pidgin is spoken as there is influence of the local language in the lexical items of such Pidgin. Edo Pidgin English is a make-shift language that derive its sources from Edo language and English language. It is a language used mostly by residence of Edo state. This work examines the structural features that are peculiar to Edo Pidgin English and which distinguish it from other varieties of Nigerian Pidgin. The approach adopted for this work is ‘descriptive linguistic approach’ by Lehmann (1999) which states that language is an activity that formulates, in most general way possible, the patterns underlying the linguistic data. Its purpose is to make the user understand the way the language works (Lehmann, 1999: 10). This approach was adopted to account and to describe the structural features of Edo Pidgin English. Primary source of data collection was adopted as data were collected from different speakers of the language and were presented by classifying them into categories based on their themes and subject matters. The analysis of the data collected therefore reveals the structural features that are peculiar to Edo Pidgin English which include ambiguity, deixis, transfer features, politeness features, code-mixing and code-switching among others. These features characterize Edo Pidgin English by showing its uniqueness which therefore make the language to be distinct from other variants of Nigerian Pidgin.
