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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.
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.
English is the most widespread language in the country due to the many different languages spoken, with 60 million speakers. [5] This includes speakers of an English creole, accounting for 51% to 57% of the total population. [5] [6] It is estimated 10% of Nigerians speak English as a first language. [7] Pakistan: 220,892,331: 108,044,691: 48.91 ...
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 .
[citation needed] Today, Hausa is the most widely spoken language in West Africa; although its speakers are mainly concentrated in the traditional Hausa heartland, it functions as the lingua franca of Nigeria's multilingual Middle Belt, including the capital of Abuja, and is also widely spoken and understood in other countries, especially ...