Friday, August 03, 2007

Languages of Nigeria

Wikipedia (here and here) dispells the myth that there are around 250 or 300 languages in Nigeria. As I blogged back in March last year, there are in fact over 500 recorded - and already quite a few have died out, and some more are about to (click here for the list of 478 listed from last year's post). Its hard to believe the figures of numbers of speakers on the wikipedia pages however - only 18 million hausa speakers in West Africa, and similar numbers for Yoruba and Igbo? That is quite silly. On the list of 478 - I never tire of reading this list: it is pure poetry..

3 comments:

Talatu-Carmen 5:17 pm  

18 million Hausa speakers in West Africa? Try more like 24 million native speakers of Hausa, and approximately 39 million people who speak it as a first or second language. Those figures are from ethnologue.com from the 80s, and are probably much larger by now.

oguro,  11:50 pm  

.... jeremy ...look what you started, we might as well start discussing the census. you know what they say about overnight evolution [if you believe in that sort of thing] ... and the numbers increased ...

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