How is it racist? You can pick at how its been written but I don't see how it's racist? Adding an accented spelling on different regular English words, with nearly the same meaning is ridiculous and makes it illegible for many speakers of pidgin in my opinion.
"Abeg, it's just common English, that they dey try to pontificate like this." If I wrote in pidgin I would only differentiate words that either don't exist in English or have an expanded meaning. Same with "story" and "tori" or "afta" and "after" or "him" and "im" or "penarity" and "penalty". Their basically purposefully throwing out traditional English spelling on words, that every pidgin speaker who can write knows how to spell, and the only issue is an accent makes them pronounce "th" as "d" which theirs's nothing wrong with. They spell basic English words like "this" and "the" as "dis and "di" with the exact same meaning. This is 90% of Nigerian Pidgin, it's accented English with a few loan words in all of Nigeria and only in one region of Nigeria can you differentiate it enough for it to be it's own language in my humble opinion. The speaker is saying other with an accent, it's not a new word it doesn't mean anything new. Using "oda" to mean "other", is insulting. But legitimately everything else is like a complete purposeful bastardization of Nigerian Standard English.
Even dey isn't too bad, although it's clearly an expanded definition of the word "they" said with a heavy accent. I have no problems including words like pikin or sabi. All Nigerians who can speak pidgin, and write, can write in English. Outside of Warri and a couple of poorer areas, anyone who speaks English and has spent a year in Nigeria can speak and understand pidgin. The place were it has a significant enough difference to be considered it's own language is Warri and some parts of the Niger Delta. Nigerian Pidgin is a spoken language, not a written one. Pidgin isn't even taught in schools in Nigeria and it's highly regional. I can respect reporting in a manner that your audience speaks, but there is also something to be said about educated journalists using accepted, formal standards of speech as far as I'm concerned!
I first noticed this sometime last year and didn't know what I was reading.
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