Nigeria has over 500 indigenous languages. Linguists estimate many could face severe endangerment or extinction within 50 to 70 years. The cause is not policy. It is the home. Children are not learning their parents’ languages. Urban lifestyles have reduced exposure. Intergenerational transmission is weakening.
Colonial education elevated English above indigenous languages. Post-independence governments did not reverse that. The National Policy on Education recommends mother-tongue instruction in early years. Implementation is uneven. In 2022, UNESCO warned that hundreds of Nigerian languages were endangered. The 2026 International Mother Tongue Day highlighted the decline again.
Children, parents and experts described the pattern. Maimuna Egigogo, 12, understands Nupe but cannot speak it. Her parents speak English at home. Amina Bello does not speak Ebira with her children. She believes English gives them an educational advantage. Benjamin Mitu and his wife speak different indigenous languages. They adopted English to avoid confusing their children. Stephen Adeniyi’s parents work long hours. He learned English from school and domestic staff.
Some families resist. Rebecca Ibrahim speaks her dialect at home and sends her children to their grandparents during holidays. Michael Peter grew up with compulsory indigenous language use, folktales, songs and proverbs. He urges parents to be intentional.
Prof Chinwe Anunobi of the National Library of Nigeria warned that neglect threatens cultural identity, traditional knowledge and community diversity. She advocates education in indigenous languages. Educationist Funmi Soyoye dismissed fears that bilingualism undermines English. “The brain is not a bucket. Learning a second language does not push out the first,” she said. She said children transfer sentence construction and storytelling skills between languages.
Winners: English, which consolidates dominance. Private schools, which market English-only instruction. Urban employers, who benefit from a monolingual workforce. Losers: Indigenous languages, which lose speakers. Grandparents, who cannot converse with grandchildren. Cultural knowledge, which disappears with each generation. Nigeria, which loses diversity. Children, who lose a heritage they cannot recover.
Bottom Line: Languages do not die in parliaments. They die at dinner tables. Nigerian parents are choosing English for advantage. The choice is rational. Its cost is permanent.