Pichinglis, commonly referred to by its speakers as Pichi and formally known as Fernando Po Creole English (Fernandino), is an Atlantic English-lexicon creole language spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of the Krio language of Sierra Leone, and was brought to Bioko by Krios who immigrated to the island during the colonial era in the 19th century.
Pichi is the most widely spoken language of the capital Malabo, next to Spanish, and it serves as a primary language to probably the majority of the capital's inhabitants. Pichi is also used as a primary language in a number of villages and towns along the Coast of Bioko – amongst them Sampaca, Fiston, Basupú, Barrio las Palmas and Luba (Morgades 2004), and is spoken as a lingua franca throughout Bioko. 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.
Size of speaker community
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 (2007 UN estimate) use Pichi regularly as a primary or secondary language.
Next to Fang, Pichi and Bubi, over ten other African languages are spoken by the peoples of Equatorial Guinea (Gordon 2005, cf. “Equatorial Guinea”).
One of these is another Creole, the Portuguese-lexicon Creole Fá d'Ambô, spoken by the people of the island of Annobón (cf. Map 1). Fa d’Ambô shares historical and linguistic ties with the other Portuguese-lexicon Creoles of the Gulf of Guinea (cf. e.g. Post 1994), namely Lungwa Santome and Angolar in São Tomé Island and Lun'gwiye in Principe Island (but also cf. Granda 1985 on the influence of Pichi on Fa d’Ambô).
The other languages traditionally spoken in Equatorial Guinea belong to the Bantu branch of the Niger–Congo family. In the literature, Pichi is known under the names Fernando Po Creole English (e.g. Gordon 2005), Fernando Po Krio (e.g. Berry 1970, Holm 1989), Fernandino Creole English (e.g. Holm 1989), Pidgin (English) (Morgades 2004), Broken English (e.g. de Zarco 1938) and Pichinglis (e.g. Lipski 1992). While many older speakers refer to the language as Krio or Pidgin, most present-day speakers refer to it as Pichinglis, Pichin with a nasalised final vowel or Pichi tout court.
Present status
The lexical similarity between Pichi and English and the supposed simplification of English structures that European observers believed they recognized in a language they did not master, lent additional weight to racist notions about a generally assumed superiority of European languages and their speakers. As a consequence, Pichi was considered an impoverished, debased form of English by Spanish colonial administrators and missionaries (cf. Zarco 1938: 5-7 for a pungent exposition of this view). Pichi, like the other Creole languages of the Atlantic Basin, still has to struggle with this difficult legacy. In spite of its great importance as a community language, and as a national and international lingua franca, Pichi enjoys no official recognition nor support, is conspicuously absent from public discourse and the official media, and has no place in the educational policy of Equatorial Guinea.