Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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.
Several studies have shown the Edo language is the major African component that constitutes the foundation of the creoles of the Gulf of Guinea.
Nigerian Pidgin is most widely spoken in the oil state Niger Delta where most of its population speak it as their first language. [10] There are accounts of pidgin being spoken first in colonial Nigeria before being adopted by other countries along the West African coast. [11]
Igala is a Yoruboid language, spoken by the Igala ethnic group of Nigeria. In 1989 an estimated 800,000 spoke Igala, primarily in Kogi State , though current estimates place the number of Igala speakers at upwards of 1.6 million.
Nigeria is the world's sixth-most populous country. The birth rate is 35.2-births/1,000 population and the death rate is 9.6 deaths/1,000 population as of 2017, while the total fertility rate is 5.07 children born/woman. [230] Nigeria's population increased by 57 million from 1990 to 2008, a 60% growth rate in less than two decades. [231]
Nigerian Fulfulde, also known as Hausa States Fulfulde, Fula, or Fulani is a variety of the Fula language spoken by the Fulani people in Nigeria, particularly in the Northern region of Nigeria. It belongs to the West Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Phonologically, Nigerian Fulfulde exhibits a system of vowel harmony and a ...