Present Status
Spanish colonial rule instilled a negative attitude towards African languages in general. But the lexical similarity between Pichi and English and the supposed simplification of English structures that European observers believed to recognise in a language they did not master, lent additional weight to racist notions about a generally assumed superiority of European languages and their speakers. As a consequence, Pichi was considered an impoverished, debased form of English by Spanish colonial administrators and missionaries (cf. Zarco 1938: 5-7 for a pungent exposition of this view). Pichi, like the other Creole languages of the Atlantic Basin, still has to struggle with this difficult legacy. In spite of its great importance as a community language, and as a national and international lingua franca, Pichi enjoys no official recognition nor support, is conspicuously absent from public discourse and the official media, and has no place in the educational policy of Equatorial Guinea.
Read more about this topic: Pichinglis
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