The History of Nigerian Linguistics A Preliminary Survey

Abstract

The scientific study of a language may be divided, on the simplest analysis, into two parts: first, the collection of words to form a vocabulary or a dictionary; second, the investigation of the ways in which words are shaped, transformed, and grouped to indicate particular thoughts, to form a grammar of the language. Early work on a language generally terminated in the production of a dictionary and a grammar. But the earliest students of Nigerian languages faced a preliminary problem before they could begin any study--they had to discover what languages existed, and how extensive geographically, and important socially, each language was. This paper is an attempt to provide a preliminary survey of the early development of Nigerian linguistics.