“HAUSA AND THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE QUESTION IN NIGERIA: PRIVILEGES, PROSPECTS AND PREDICAMENTS”

Abstract

Since independence, and as is typical of most African nations, Nigeria has retained a foreign tongue, English, as its official medium at the expense of its local languages. A key reason often associated with this action is the country’s critical multilingualism which government finds a difficult nut to crack as to come up with a sound national language policy. Protagonists of this argument try to show that choosing any Nigerian language or groups of languages to serve as 2 national language(s) at the expense of other indigenous tongues could set communities against one another and, possibly, even set the nation on war path.