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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.
Nigeria borders Niger in the north, Chad in the northeast, Cameroon in the east, and Benin in the west. Nigeria is a federal republic comprising 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, where its capital, Abuja, is located. The largest city in Nigeria is Lagos, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world and the largest in Africa.
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).
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa.Examples familiar to English-speakers are the tut-tut (British spelling) or tsk! tsk!
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 British and African slavers to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century [6] – is the most widely spoken lingua franca and spoken by over 60 million people.
In central Nigeria, the Kanuri are usually referred to as Bare-Bari or Beriberi. [citation needed] Central Kanuri, also known as Yerwa Kanuri, is the main language of the Kanuri people living in Borno State, Yobe State and Gombe State, and it is usually referred to as Kanuri in Nigeria. [citation needed]
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.
Another example is the Arab expansion in the 7th century, which led to the extension of Arabic from its homeland in Asia, into much of North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Trade languages are another age-old phenomenon in the African linguistic landscape.