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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.
The Volta–Niger family of languages, also known as West Benue–Congo or East Kwa, is one of the branches of the Niger–Congo language family, with perhaps 70 million speakers. Among these are the most important languages of southern Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and southeast Ghana: Yoruba, Igbo, Bini, and Gbe.
Yoruba is classified among the Edekiri languages, which together with Itsekiri and the isolate Igala form the Yoruboid group of languages within the Volta–Niger branch of the Niger–Congo family. The linguistic unity of the Niger–Congo family dates to deep pre-history, with estimates ranging around 11,000 years ago (the end of the Upper ...
The linguistic groups of Nigeria in 1979. Native speakers of Hausa, the Hausa people, are mostly found in southern Niger and northern Nigeria. [4] [3] [9] The language is used as a lingua franca by non-native speakers in most of northern Nigeria, southern Niger, northern Cameroon, northern Ghana, northern Benin, northern Togo, southern Chad and parts of Sudan.
Nigeria is a very ethnically diverse country with 371 ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Hausa, Yoruba and the Igbo. [1] Nigeria has one official language which is English, as a result of the British colonial rule over the nation.
This makes Benue–Congo one of the largest subdivisions of the Niger–Congo language family, both in number of languages, of which Ethnologue counts 976 (2017), and in speakers, numbering perhaps 350 million. Benue–Congo also includes a few minor isolates in the Nigeria–Cameroon region, but their exact relationship is uncertain.
Ethnolinguistic territory of the Hausa people in Niger and Nigeria. The Hausa language, a member of Afroasiatic family of languages, has more first-language speakers than any other African language. It has around 50 million first-language speakers, and close to 30 million second-language speakers. [71]
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. Even ...