Why does the BBC/Foreign Office finance this?

[Imdunfer]

I get this BBC output on my news feed for some odd reason. I find I can always understand it easily.

It follows, for me, that if it was written in English that people who speak Pidgin would understand the English

So just why do we spend money on this?

www.bbc.com/pidgin/articles/cq59xn5w95no

It's about accessibility and making people want to use the BBC as a trusted news source and, in doing so, absorbing a British viewpoint on the world.

If I took a news article written in English and used an AI to translate it into Mandarin and back again, you could probably still understand it. But reading it would be hard work, the sentence construction would feel off and you probably wouldn't want to read other articles like that if you had a choice. That's how Pidgin speakers feel about reading UK English. Offering news in a language that people actually speak and understand gives them that choice.

Absorbing a British viewpoint on the world sounds like an Imperial project.

i have no idea why there is a BBC world service or Persian service either. None of the audience are contributing financially to the cost of running the BBC. It’s v strange.

As well as providing a more readable text for people whose first language is Pidgin, isn't it also about encouraging and respecting a language that is spoken by relatively few people (and thereby helping tomaintain all the cultural goods associated with a thriving language)?

Do you also think that Welsh-language and Scottish Gaelic programming is a waste of money?

What do you think the purpose of the Foreign Office is? It's to promote the UK and its interests around the world. Getting a British viewpoint out there helps with that.

There are more people who speak Pidgin than the population of the UK.

Yes, my understanding is that pidgin is spoken mainly by people as a second language to enable them to understand other people whose first language they don't share.

That used to be English, and Pidgin is very clearly predominantly English.

I doubt that anyone who can read that Pidgin couldn't read English. I doubt that having a BBC section devoted to it does anything much more than make a few people feel worthy.

Welsh Scots Gaelic Irish Cornish all came first. English came later to those areas.

Pidgin is very clearly a dialect of English.

There's no comparison.

"I can't stretch my imagination to understand why someone else might want something different to me, therefore nobody needs it."

Pidgin is not a dialect of English. It's a contact language.

The reason the Foreign Office (not the BBC) fund the World Service is because its a fantastic, and extremely cheap, form of soft power.

The BBC is the world's most respected source of news and is an important pillar (along with the British Council) of maintaining the UK's standing abroad, particularly in developing countries and of course across the Commonwealth.

Soft power is important.

Quite.

Of course it's a legacy of empire - but it's an incredibly powerful one. Better that people in developing and war-torn countries and autocracies get their news from the UK than from the Chinese or the Americans.

We do fund the world service. Unfortunately the foreign office restricted funding so now the licence fee has to pay for some of it. Maybe that will change under the next bbc charter

For many people in this world, our world, people who live under dictatorships and amongst the ravages of war, the World Service is the unbiased source of news they can get.

It seems to be popular. 800,000 unique viewers visit the site at least once per week week and the egnagement with the Beeb's Facebook page is many times higher than that.

Oh I understand why people want things. I don't always understand why we should pay for them.

Never underestimate the value of soft power.

It's a contact language that is so heavily based on English the people who have never heard Pidgin spoken and never read Pidgin before can understand it perfectly.

That makes it a dialect of English as far as I'm concerned.

How many people would have read it written in plain English, assuming that they're reading it to get the BBC news?

Wait until OP finds out the BBC World Service is also available on the Dark Web.....

Is Norwegian a dialect of Danish? Or Catalan a dialect of Castillian? Or Scots a dialect of English?

The Scots argument is one I already answered, the Scots were speaking Scots before the English invaded. The example of Pidgin more is more akin to Glaswegian, only probably easier to understand!

Glaswegian is a dialect of Scots. Scots is an Anglo-Saxon language, just like English. The Scots were not speaking English before the Anglo-Saxons invaded, they were speaking Pictish and Gaelic.

The usual definition of dialects is that if two speakers (not readers) can mutually understand each other then they are speaking different dialects of the same language.

I can guarantee that you would not be able to converse freely with a pidgin speaker - while they may understand you, you would be absolutely stumped, hence why pidgin is considered a separate language.

Of course this falls down when you consider Danish and Norwegian, which are very mutually intelligible in both spoken and written form, but are considered separate languages.

I meant English spoken by a Glaswegian, but I'm sure you knew that.

No I didn’t. I assumed you meant Glaswegian, which is a dialect of Central Scots. As famously spoken by Rab C Nesbitt.

I think it is very peculiar for linguists to suggest that Rab C Nesbitt isn't speaking English.

I had no idea that people were pretending saying that taking one language and changing how the words are pronounced and adding in a few words that are only usually spoken in that place creates a new language.

Are Liverpudlian and Scouse dialectss also considered new languages?

You learn something new every day, but some of it feels very like the emporer's new clothes and smacks of people desperate to deny that they are speaking the language of their colonisers.