Linguistist

3 October 2026

Pikin, Yu Sabi

There is a form at the end of every term, and on the form there is a box, and the box asks what language the lesson was taught in. The box is not blank. It has two lines printed inside it already. The first line is English. The second is Local.

I know a man who teaches in Bo and he has filled this box for nine years. He does not tick English. He does not tick Local. He writes one word in the margin in capital letters and he has written it long enough that the ink is a habit now. The word is KRIO.

Local is not a name. Local is a shelf. You put a thing on that shelf when you have not decided what to call it, and if it sits there long enough you forget that it ever had a name at all.

A woman stands at a doorway in Bo and calls her child in from the rain. What she says is: Pikin, yu sabi? Child, do you know?

Three words, and none of them came from the same place.

Pikin is Portuguese. Pequeno. Small, and by the time it reached this street it meant child, the way a small person is a child. Yu is English, worn down to two letters. Sabi is Portuguese again, saber, to know, and it has travelled so far that it is now in Nigeria too, in Lagos and Onitsha, where nobody has ever heard of Bo.

And the way she says all three of them in one breath, with no seams, is West African. That is the part the form has no box for.

In Freetown they will tell you the language is broken English. Broken is a word for a chair. A chair is broken when it can no longer take weight. Krio is spoken by ninety-six out of every hundred people in this country. It is the language of the market and the courtroom floor and the radio call-in. It has taken weight for two hundred years. A thing that carries that much is not broken. It is built.

Built out of salvage, which is not the same as accident. The first Krio speakers were people who had been carried across an ocean and set down with almost nothing: Nova Scotians who had already lost one home, Maroons from Jamaica, recaptives taken off slave ships and landed at Freetown. They kept the words that carried and dropped the ones that did not. Portuguese planks, English beams, Akan and Yoruba and Igbo nails, and a grammar that seems to have come across the water from Jamaica. You do not get a language that holds a whole country by breaking things. You get it by choosing, over and over, in a hurry, under pressure, which pieces to keep.

Even the grammar argues with the English it borrowed from. In English, time is worn inside the person: I go, I went, he goes. In Krio the verb does not change at all. Time is said out loud and kept outside the doer. Bin is before. Go is after. Don is already. De is happening now. The person stays the same; only the when moves. My friend says that is the part he would fight for, the way you learn to stand in a sentence without the sentence bending you into a different shape for every hour.

He has written KRIO in the margin for nine years and the ministry has never once corrected him. He used to think that was permission. Now he thinks it is something closer to forgetting, the kind that looks like kindness. Nobody has decided that Krio is official, so it cannot go in the printed box, so it goes in the margin for another nine years, and the child in Bo keeps learning a language her own school will not write down.

She will grow up and call it broken like everybody else. She will be wrong, and the language will not mind. It will hold her weight anyway, the way it held her mother's, in a doorway, in the rain, in three words from three ships.