The Linguistic Situation in Northern Nigeria and the Plights of Minority Languages: A Study of Hausa and Gbagyi Languages

This paper investigates the sociolinguistic situation of minority languages in the northern part of Nigeria.and the dominance of Hausa language on small group languages using Gbagyi as a case study. The paper is aimed at identifying the aspects of the language that the people have maintained or lost over time. In doing so, we examine the attitudes of the native speakers of Gbagyi towards.their language and Hausa by succinctly studying the factors responsible for the gradual disappearance or decline in the use of Gbagyi. A word list of 400 hundred (nouns and verbs) was used with their Hausa equivalents to determine the extent of encroachment into Gbagyi vocabulary. Also, we elicited samples of everyday sentences from competent speakers of Gbagyi as well as the speech patterns of both Hausa and Gbagyi in order to ascertain the degree at which Hausa affects Gbagyi speech form. Findings from this study reveal that more than 40% of Gbagyi vocabulary is either of Hausa origin or borrowed from Hausa; that a relatively low percentage of Gbagyi speakers (about 30% or less) are still in full grasp of the language and perhaps 50% are of the older generation. Factors such as family and home, lack of Gbagyi literacy programs, inter-tribal marriages, lack of language loyalty (language attitude), and lack of inter-generational transmission among others are revealed as factors and actors responsible for the endangerment of Gbagyi or the decline in the use of Gbagyi. To this end, our focus has been to investigate into the sociolinguistic situation hence the study proffers explicit and dimensional solutions so as to prevent the language from extinction. This paper, among other things,recommends that language awareness by created at all levels of education on the importance of minority languages.