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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.
Number of speakers Established Immigrant Total Percent [note 1] Total Mean Median ... Nigeria: 525 7 524 7.37 163,317,444 348,225 14,000
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, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
Although the majority of Urdu-speakers reside in Pakistan (including 30 million native speakers, [5] and up to 94 million second-language speakers), [10] where Urdu is the national and official language, most speakers who use Urdu as their native tongue live in northern India, where it is one of 22 official languages. [112]
A language designated as having a unique legal status in the state: typically, the language used in a nation's legislative bodies, and often, official government business. Regional language A language designated as having official status limited to a specific area, administrative division, or territory of the state.
A minority language among small language groups in a small country may be more important than a language with a large number of speakers in a large country. The population which speaks Hausa numbers 25 million people in total, of which 18 million are part of the population of 140 million in Nigeria. They are a large linguistic population, but ...
Hindi has more than 550 million speakers in India alone, of whom 422 million are native, 98.2 million are second language speakers, and 31.2 million are third language speakers. [37] [38] Hindi is the lingua franca of the northern part of India, along with Pakistan (as Urdu), with its importance as a global language increasing day by day. [39]