Multilingualism in Nigeria. a Blessing or a Curse free essay sample

Others see multilingualism as a political matter, that is, an issue which requires solutions to language problems from the policy makers who are political authorities in a multilingual nation, and as an economic problem, because, as Jahr (1998) states, chaotic language differences are determinants of economic disadvantage whereas well planned language differences are considered to be resources.Many studies on various multilingual societies have been conducted by among others Cuvelier, Du Plessis, Teck (2003) on multilingualism, education and social integration in Belgium, Europe, South Africa and Southern Africa; Deprez Du Plessis (2000) on multilingualism and government in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia and South Africa; Emenanjo (1990) on multilingualism and language policy in Nigeria. This work shows that as much as multilingualism in Nigeria is a blessing, it is also a curse. This phenomenon is more prevalent in Asian and African countries because of the merging of many ethnic groups (with different languages) to form individual countries. We will write a custom essay sample on Multilingualism in Nigeria. a Blessing or a Curse or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page This was done by the excolonialists. However, language pluralism also exists in Europe and other continents of the world. Multilingualism, therefore, is universal and findings have shown that there is no monolingual nation. According to Hudson (1980) there are about four or five thousand languages in the world but only one hundred and forty nations. Obviously then, most countries have a large number of languages.The fact however, is that the degree of multilingualism in Asian and African countries is higher than that of the developed world. The Guinness Book of knowledge (1997) shows that Africa has about 1,300 languages, the highest number among all the continents of the world. Khubchandani (1983) shows that India has about two hundred classified languages. Similarly, the Encyclopaedia Americana reveals that the linguistic diversity of New Guinea is probably greater than that of any area of comparable size in the world. It has seven hundred languages. Therefore, examples of nations that are highly multilingual abound.