National and Official Languages in Nigeria: Reflections on Linguistic Interference and the Impact of Language Policy and Politics on Minority Languages
Emmanuel Aito University of Regina
Introduction
Known for its “extreme linguistic diversity” (Elugbe 1994), Nigeria is home to languages numbering about 400. Although its land mass is less than 7 per cent of the total area of the African continent, most scholars concur that about 20 per cent of Africa’s more than 2,000 languages are spoken in Nigeria. Official language policies have variously been enunciated in documents such as the National Policy on Education (1977, revised in 1981), and the 1979 Constitution. Two other less cited documents exist, to wit the 1989 Constitution and the 1987 Political Bureau report. Such policies testify to the attention supposedly devoted to education, unity and independence.
1. National and official languages in Nigeria: minority languages, language policy and politics
Minority and majority languages in Africa derive their designations from numbers of speakers, literary, political or educational status. However, this dichotomy becomes dubious when a minority language employed at the national or state level assumes the status of a major language (Bamgbose 1994). Furthermore, the combined strength of all the minority languages within a polity may render the denomination “minority” a misnomer on account of its suggestive, ideologized meaning of insignificance or smallness. For instance, the combined size of minority languages in Ghana reaches more than 45% of the country’s population, while in Nigeria that fraction is estimated to be over 37%. Literacy and development in Nigeria are thus best apprehended in the context of language planning in a multilingual society. With regard to minority language use, we imply in this paper that literacy, communication and the linguistic implications of literacy development fall into the ambit of resource planning (Kaplan and Baldauf Jr. 1997) and its inherent politics. The innate heterogeneity of the Nigerian linguistic reality is fertile for an appraisal of the intractable literacy deficit that continues to defy the lip service of political rhetoric since early in the1980s. In 1980, for instance, 30 million out of 80 million Nigerians were illiterate, while today that number extrapolates to more than 50 million of an estimated population of 120 million, a figure recently put in doubt by the Minister of Internal Affairs, who proposes 160 million as being more accurate (Guardiannews.com of May 13, 2003). The fact that most minority languages are yet to be well described and used at the grassroots levels contributes in no small measure to this lamentable detail. Furthermore, a well considered response to the imperative of national development in an African society such as Nigeria must include modifying the perennially misplaced notion that monolingualism, or the elusive search for a national language, is the panacea for underdevelopment and the inaccessibility of academic, economic, political and technological knowledge. As a countervailing measure, a return to literacy in the local or indigenous languages is urgently compelling, as substantiated by the May 18, 2002 Guardiannews.com report of the Federal Education Minister lamenting the country’s illiteracy rate and school drop-out levels. In the context of the Education For All (EPA) programme deadline of 2015, even the Minister claimed that 50% of Nigerians have never