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Nigerian English, also known as Nigerian Standard English, is a variety of English spoken in Nigeria. [1] Based on British and American English, the dialect contains various loanwords and collocations from the native languages of Nigeria, due to the need to express concepts specific to the cultures of ethnic groups in the nation (e.g. senior wife).
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.
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions.
Nigerian Pidgin, also known simply as Pidgin or Broken (Broken English) or as Naijá in scholarship, is an English-based creole language spoken as a lingua franca across Nigeria. The language is sometimes referred to as Pijin or Vernacular .
West African Pidgin English arose during the period of the transatlantic slave trade as a language of commerce between British and African slave traders. Portuguese merchants were the first Europeans to trade in West Africa beginning in the 15th century, and West African Pidgin English contains numerous words of Portuguese origin such as sabi ('to know'), a derivation of the Portuguese saber. [3]
Urban middle-class Black Africans have developed an English accent, with similar inflection as first-language English speakers. Within this ethnic group, variations exist: Most Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele) speakers have a distinct accent, with the pronunciation of words like "the" and "that" as would "devil" and "dust", respectively ...
Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
Otiti ò 3SG chó steal. PST ọhọ hen ná DET Òtítí ò chó ọhọ ná Otiti 3SG steal.PST hen DET ‘Otiti stole the hen.’ References ^ Urhobo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) ^ Elugbe, B. O. 1989. Edoid: Phonology and Lexicon. Port Harcourt: University of Port Harcourt Press. ^ "Nigeria | History, Population, Flag, Map, Languages, Capital, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com ...