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There are over 520 native languages spoken in Nigeria. [1] [2] [3] The official language is English, [4] [5] which was the language of Colonial Nigeria.The English-based creole Nigerian Pidgin – first used by the British and African slavers to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century [6] – is the most common lingua franca, spoken by over 60 million people.
Nigeria has one official language which is English, as a result of the British colonial rule over the nation. Nevertheless, it is not spoken as a first language in the entire country because other languages have been around for over a thousand years making them the major languages in terms of numbers of native speakers.
The Niger–Congo languages constitute the largest language family spoken in West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. [ citation needed ] One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord .
Number of living languages Number of speakers Established Immigrant Total Percent [note 1] Total Mean Median Papua New Guinea: 840 0 840 11.81 4,213,381 5,040 1,315 Indonesia: 707 2 709 9.98 222,191,197 315,165 3,500 Nigeria: 525 7 532 7.37 163,317,444 348,225 14,000 India: 453 6 459 ? 1,257,421,714 2,924,237 35,000 China (mainland only) 302 3 305
The pronunciation and accents often differ a great deal, mainly due to the extremely heterogeneous mix of African languages present in the West Indies, but if written on paper or spoken slowly, the creole languages of the Caribbean are for the most part mutually intelligible with the creole languages of West Africa. [12]
The major languages spoken in Nigeria represent three major families of languages of Africa: the majority are Niger-Congo languages, such as Igbo, Yoruba, Ibibio, Ijaw, Fulfulde, Ogoni, and Edo. Kanuri , spoken in the northeast, primarily in Borno and Yobe State , is part of the Nilo-Saharan family, and Hausa is an Afroasiatic language.
Berom language; Bete language (Nigeria) Bete-Bendi language; Bikwin–Jen languages; Bile language; Bina language; Biseni language; Bitare language; Boga language; Boghom language; Boko language; Bokobaru language; Bokyi language; Bole language; Bole–Tangale languages; Boze language; Bu language; Bumaji language; Bunu language (Nigeria) Bura ...
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages [1] spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, [1] mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet.