‘Other Tongue’ Policy and Ethnic Nationalism In Nigeria

This paper examines the prospect or otherwise of the success of the Nigerian language policy of learning a major language, in addition to a child’s mother tongue, following the series of the political crises caused by the collapse of the democratic experiment in 1993 and the consequent rise in ethnic nationalisms in the country. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, it reports on the perceptions and attitudes of the Yoruba-speaking people of the south-western part of the country to the two major languages of Hausa and Igbo. One major finding of the study is that while attitudes to the Hausa and Igbo ethnic groups are not exactly favourable, attitudes to their languages seem more pragmatic, and that the Yoruba are willing to learn the other major languages, provided there is no threat of any one of them becoming the sole national language.