If you speak Nigerian Pidgin, you already speak some Igbo.
You may never have noticed. Pidgin borrows from everywhere — English, Portuguese, Hausa, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Igbo — and some of those borrowings have settled so completely that nobody stops to ask where they came from.
Ifeoma Igbotic counted out 27 of them in a video this week, and it is worth watching for her full list. What follows is our own walk through the words with the clearest Igbo origins, and what each one actually means in Igbo — which is often more specific, and sometimes more beautiful, than the Pidgin use suggests.
Everyday Igbo words in Pidgin
- Biko — please. In Pidgin it carries more weight than the English word. Biko is closer to I am begging you than to a polite softener.
- Ngwa (also ngwanụ) — come on, alright then, get moving. It starts things and it ends things.
- Ozugo — it is enough. Said to stop something that has gone on too long.
- Jisike — literally hold strength. Said to someone in the middle of hard work. English has no single word for it.
- Daalụ — thank you.
- Odeshi — literally it does not leak. It became slang for untouchable or bulletproof, which is a short walk from the original.
The exclamations
These travel fastest, because they do not need to be translated to be understood.
- Chai — dismay, awe or admiration. The meaning sits in how long you hold the vowel.
- Ewo — pain or shock. Usually involuntary.
- Nna, as in nna mehn — literally father, used in Pidgin purely for emphasis.
How Igbo names people
- Nwa — child. It survives in nwa boy and nwa baby.
- Nwanne — sibling, literally child of my mother. In Pidgin it stretches to cover a close friend, which is the point of the word.
- Nne — mother. Said warmly to a woman of any age, including a small girl.
- Onye — person. It is the first half of onye ara (madman) and onye ọcha (white person).
- Igwe — king. Used for anyone wealthy or powerful enough to be hailed.
- Imu ahịa — apprenticeship. The Igbo business apprenticeship system, borrowed whole because there was no other name for it.
If the family terms are new to you, we have a fuller guide to family members in Igbo.
The food words
Food words cross languages more easily than any others, because the dish and its name arrive together.
- Isi ewu — goat head.
- Nkwobi — cow foot, served in palm oil sauce.
- Abacha — African salad, from dried shredded cassava.
- Ugba — sliced oil bean seed, the thing that makes abacha taste like abacha.
- Ogbono — wild mango seed, ground for soup.
- Okpa — Bambara nut pudding, closely associated with Enugu.
- Ofe — soup. It is the first word of ofe nsala and ofe akwụ.
More of these in our guide to Igbo food names.
The ones people argue about
One thing worth adding, because it comes up every time a list like this goes around. Not every word that feels Igbo started out that way — and a few are genuinely contested, with native speakers on both sides.
- Oga — genuinely argued over. Most etymologies trace it to Yoruba òga, though it is claimed across several Nigerian languages and plenty of Igbo speakers will tell you otherwise.
- Oyibo — same story. Usually traced to Yoruba òyìnbó, while Igbo has its own way of saying it, onye ọcha.
- Wahala — Hausa, and Arabic before that. Not in dispute.
- Akara — Yoruba.
- Abeg — plain English, I beg, worn down by use. The English twin of biko, not a relative of it.
Why it matters
People who say they do not speak a word of Igbo are often already carrying twenty of them. They just arrived through Pidgin rather than through family.
That is a better starting point than it sounds. Biko, nwanne and ngwa are not vocabulary you have to build — they are vocabulary you have to notice. The work is learning what they actually mean, and then what goes around them.
You can hear any of these words pronounced in the IgboLearn dictionary — search the word and tap play.
And if you want the politeness words in full, including when biko is the right choice and when it is too strong, start with how to say please, sorry and thank you in Igbo.
Thanks to Ifeoma Igbotic for the original video. Follow her for more on Igbo language and culture.