05, 2019 A Paper Presented by Fortune Nwaiwu in the Department of English and Communication Arts, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Rivers State of Nigeria. Abstracts Many scholars claim that pidgin is a language of its own with community of speakers who pass it on from one generation to another (Hudson 2001:p.62), but this paper examines pidgins from the historical perspectives and presents a stunning fact about the linguistic status of pidgins as corrupted variety of English. With the influx of words from their lexifier language into their substrate variety, pidgins are then seen as debased and corrupted variety of the prestige language. This claim is supported by Krapp (1924) and Kurath (1928) and is validated with the imperfect second language learning hypothesis which states that pidgins are the result of failed attempts at learning the prestige language, (see Brown and Attardo 2009:p.126). This paper is very significant in the sense that it sheds more light in the unde...