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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 widely spoken lingua franca and spoken by over 60 million people.
Several hundred different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The different Latin alphabets made it impractical to create Nigerian typewriters. In the 1980s the National Language Centre (NLC) undertook to develop a single alphabet suitable for writing all the languages of the country, and replacing use of Arabic script, taking as its starting point a model proposed by linguist Kay Williamson in 1981.
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).
Note that in the language names, orthographic oe stands for the mid central vowel ə, a practice that had been adopted by missionaries in the Shendam area during the 1930s, such as Father E. Sirlinger. [3] [4] [5] Unlike many other West Chadic languages, Angas languages do not have complex nominal and verbal morphology. [6]
Guosa draws the bulk of its vocabulary from Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, either taken directly or made from a combination of words from these languages. [2] English also provides many of the more technical terms, either directly or through one of the aforementioned African languages.
Esan is a tonal Edoid language of Nigeria. Dictionaries and grammar texts of the Esan language are being produced. There are many dialects, including Ogwa, Ẹkpoma (Ekuma), Ebhossa (Ewossa), Ewohimi, Ewu, Ewatto, Ebelle, Igueben, Irrua, Ohordua, Uromi, Uzea, Ubiaja and Ugboha.
/ŋ/, and only /ŋ/, appears geminate. /ʔ/ is rare, perhaps borrowed. /h/ is known from one word, not borrowed. Vowels are /i e ɛ a ə ɔ o u/. All may be doubled, but there are no long vowels. /a/ is neutralized to /ə/ in all but final position. Tone is probably high, low, and falling, as in Chamba Leko.
Berom or Birom (Cèn Bèrom) is the most widely spoken Plateau language in Nigeria. The language is locally numerically important and is consistently spoken by Berom of all ages in rural areas. However, the Berom are shifting to Hausa in cities. [1] The small Cen and Nincut dialects may be separate languages. Approximately 1 million (2010 ...