Nigerian Diversity
When teaching about Nigeria, I remember holding up a print out of The Languages of Nigeria from Ethnologue. It pointed out that there were 10 official languages and a total of 527 languages used in the country. The list is huge and students were appropriately impressed. They were also stumped by my question about whether democratic government was possible in a country with such diversity.In his Naijablog, Jeremy Weate interviewed linguist Uwe Seibert about the languages of Nigeria. It's another illustration of the cultural diversity that is Nigeria and a reminder of how oversimplified basic political analysis can be. And you don't have to print out a 50-page list of languages.
On Nigerian Languages
Nigeria is not only rich in languages, there are also many different language groups. First of all, three of the four language macro-families of Africa are represented in Nigeria: Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Within the macro-families, there are subgroups, e.g. Atlantic, Benue-Congo, Chadic, Mande, and Saharan. These language groups are quite different in terms of their vocabulary and grammatical structures…
Many of the more than 500 languages of Nigeria are quite small and often only elderly people speak them really well. If their children - who still understand and speak a reduced form of these languages - fail to teach them to their children, these languages are definitely in danger of extinction. This could happen to a large percentage of Nigerian languages within the next 20 years…
I don't think that larger population languages like Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Kanuri, Fulfulde or Tiv will die out so easily...
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Labels: cleavages, culture, Nigeria, political culture, political integration
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:10 AM
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