Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Development of English in Nigeria Up to 1914: A Socio-Historical Appraisal

1978; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

0018-2540

Abiodun Adetugbo,

Multilingual Education and Policy

That the English language has established itself firmly in Nigeria as probably the country's most important language belies the fact that it is only a second language in Nigeria. Perhaps nowhere else other than in the developing countries has such vast linguistic acculturation taken place in the last two hundred years. Yet, the importance of the English language in Nigeria is not in terms of the number of its speakers (where it may not rank among the first three languages spoken in the country), -but in terms of the variety of functions that the English language performs when compared with Nigeria's indigenous languages. Official figures of the number of Nigerian speakers of English are not available. Estimated guesses1 put the number as at 1963 between 2.75 million and 5.5 million. The range of these figures reflects the level of competence as of primary school and above, and the lower figure for those of secondary school and above. The higher figure represents just about 10% of the country's 1963 population of 55 million. With the explosion in education at all levels since then, there must have been a net gain in the percentage of speakers of English in the country of say between 1 0 and 25 . Using again the 1963 census figures, we find that three of Nigeria's major languages have these figures: Hausa, 11.6 million; Yoruba, 11.2 million; and Igbo, 9.2 million. In terms of the number of speakers, therefore, those Nigerian languages are more important to Nigeria than English. Functionally, however, the English language in Nigeria outstrips all of Nigeria's indigenous languages. As a multilingual country, each of Nigeria's more than 300 languages is spoken almost ethnically, and is restricted, as it were, to a specific geographical area in the country. For inter-ethnic and intertribal communication, the English language is the medium. And even where those