Nigerian Pidgin Tops African Languages in 2025 with 121 Million Speakers

Nigerian Pidgin has become the most spoken language in Africa in 2025, reaching a staggering 121 million speakers, according to a new report by Ethnologue, compiled by Visual Capitalist.

Although only about 5 million people speak it as their first language, 116 million use Pidgin as a second language. This makes it a dominant language in Nigeria and one of the fastest-growing means of communication across the continent.

For many Nigerians, Pidgin is more than just a way to talk – it’s a unifier. In markets, music studios, movie sets, and even social media posts, Pidgin helps people from different ethnic groups connect easily. From Lagos to Port Harcourt, and even beyond Nigeria’s borders, it’s the language of the street, the sound of Afrobeats, and the pulse of everyday life.

Nigerian Pidgin now ranks 14th in the world, ahead of widely known languages like Swahili, Hausa, and Egyptian Arabic. Hausa, which is spoken in Nigeria and Niger, has about 94 million speakers and ranks 19th globally.

Worldwide, English leads with 1.5 billion speakers, followed by Mandarin Chinese (1.2 billion) and Hindi (609 million).

The language’s rapid rise is linked to urban migration, cultural exports like Nollywood and Afrobeats, and Nigeria’s role in West African trade. However, despite its popularity, Pidgin is still considered informal. It has no official status in Nigeria and is rarely used in government or education.

The global top 25 list also features Japanese, Urdu, and Turkish languages, showing how population size and second-language usage shape linguistic influence worldwide.

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