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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.
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.
In Nigeria, English is acquired through formal education. [16] As English has been in contact with multiple different languages in Nigeria, Nigerian English has become much more prominent and is very similar to both American and British English, and it is often referred to as a group of different sub-varieties. [16]
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).
Nigerians or the Nigerian people are citizens of Nigeria or people with ancestry from Nigeria. [22] The name Nigeria was derived from the Niger River running through the country. This name was allegedly coined in the late 19th century by British journalist Flora Shaw , who later married Baron Frederick Lugard , a British colonial administrator ...
The language they speak is called the Edo language. The Bini people are closely related to several other ethnic groups, that usually speak Edo languages, for example the Esan, however it is important to address the fact that the name "Benin" (and "Bini") is a Portuguese corruption, which came from the word "Ubinu", which came into use during ...
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.
The Itsekiri are a people of mixed ethnic origins who speak a language very closely related to the Yoruba of south western Nigeria and the Igala language of central Nigeria [11] but which has also borrowed some cultural practice from the Ijebu people, Ile-Ife and Benin, they engaged with Portuguese in trade terminologies, as the Itsekiri were the first people in Nigeria to establish contact ...