Lagos is Yoruba-speaking but the most multilingual city in Nigeria; every Nigerian language has a Lagos diaspora, and Lagos Pidgin is the de facto urban lingua franca.
Major languages#
- Yoruba (Lagos / Eko / Awori / Ijebu dialects) — indigenous communities.
- English — administrative and elite.
- Nigerian Pidgin — universal cross-ethnic street language.
- Igbo, Hausa — large migrant communities (Lagos has the largest Igbo and second-largest Hausa diasporas in the south).
Minor and endangered languages#
- Aguda Portuguese — preserved in surnames and food traditions of the Brazilian returnee community.
- Egun — Badagry; cross-border with Benin Republic.
Lingua francas#
Yoruba and Pidgin in markets; English in offices and schools.
Notable literary and political moments#
- Lagos was the first city in West Africa to publish in Yoruba — *Iwe Irohin* (1859, Henry Townsend), the first newspaper in any African language.
- Lagos Pidgin developed from 17th-century Portuguese-English trading creole into modern Nigerian Pidgin — now spoken by an estimated 75 million Nigerians.
Sources & further reading#
- Ethnologue: Languages of Nigeria (SIL).
- Roger Blench, *An Atlas of Nigerian Languages* (3rd ed., 2019).
- Ayo Bamgbose, *Language and the Nation* (1991).
- UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.