Language Preference as a Precursor to Displacement and Extinction in Nigeria: The Roles of English Language and Nigerian Pidgin

The fact that language is primarily oral makes it naturally susceptible to extinction or death. This is because there is the tendency for its speakers to abandon it as a result of their preference for a more prestigious language such as an official second language or as result of a deliberate policy of the colonial masters to discourage the development and the use of indigenous languages for their selfish reasons as well as the unwholesome adoption of the colonial master’s language as official language after independence. Naturally, the Nigerian masses have adopted Nigerian Pidgin to cope with the multilingual nature of their metropolis. Without statistics, this sounds alarming. Because the relevant sections of the National Policy on Education has not been properly implemented, the aspect that relates to learning and using the local languages has been largely ignored by most schools in Nigeria. Using a qualitative (descriptive) and inferential approach, we attempt to examine the roles of the English language and Nigerian Pidgin viz-a-viz the gradual decline in the population of speakers and endangerment of some Nigerian languages like Efik, Ibibio, Igbo, Yoruba, and so on. A major finding is that most young Nigerians cannot speak their own mother tongues, at all or well enough, because their parents and their schools simply discourage children from speaking them at home and at school respectively where the indigenous languages are termed ‘vernaculars’. Moreover, it is also discovered that most Nigerians switch between English and Pidgin depending on whether the context/nature of their communication is formal or informal. This points to the fact that our indigenous languages are being displaced, endangered, and may even be exterminated.