Studies in English Language Teaching ISSN 2372-9740 (Print) ISSN 2329-311X (Online) Vol. 4, No. 4, 2016 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/selt Sociolinguistics of the Varieties of West African Pidgin Englishes—A Review Edward Owusu1,3*, Samuel Kyei Adoma1 & Daniel Oti Aboagye2 1 Department of Communication Studies, Sunyani Technical University, Sunyani, Ghana 2 Counselling Unit, Sunyani Technical University, Sunyani, Ghana 3 Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana * Edward Owusu, E-mail:
[email protected] Received: October 26, 2016 Accepted: November 6, 2016 Online Published: November 13, 2016 doi:10.22158/selt.v4n4p534 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/selt.v4n4p534 Abstract Language contact is a key issue in the field of sociolinguistics. One notable phenomenon in the field of language contact is Pidgin English. Historically, Pidgin began as a language marked by traditional interference used chiefly by the prosperous and privileged sections of a community, represented by the unskilled and illiterate class of the society (Quirk et al., 1985). However, nowadays, it has gained status in some communities to the extent that it has become the mother-tongue of such communities. This paper, therefore, investigates the sociolinguistics of the multiplicity of West African Pidgins of Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana against some sociolinguistic variables of gender, attitudes, code switching, borrowing, slang, and domains of language use. The paper has been structured into two main parts. The first section contains the reviews/synopses of the various papers or works that have been used for the study. The second section deals with a discussion on the prominent sociolinguistic variables found in the various papers.