By Joshua Tosin Ogunsakin 
Nigerian Pidgin is the most spoken language in Africa in 2025, with 121 million speakers, according to new data from Ethnologue compiled by Visual Capitalist.
The ranking, which combines both first and second-language speakers, places Nigerian Pidgin 14th globally, ahead of Egyptian Arabic, Hausa, and Swahili. Only about 5 million people speak Pidgin as a first language, but 116 million use it as a second language, making it one of the fastest-growing lingua francas on the continent.
Pidgin serves as a bridge language across Nigeria’s diverse ethnic groups and is widely used in media, entertainment, commerce, and informal communication. Its reach extends to parts of West Africa through trade and migration.
Hausa, another major West African language spoken in Nigeria and Niger, ranks 19th globally with 94 million speakers 58 million first-language and 36 million second-language users.
Globally, English tops the 2025 list with 1.5 billion speakers, followed by Mandarin Chinese at 1.2 billion and Hindi at 609 million. While Mandarin and Spanish have large numbers of native speakers, English’s dominance is driven by its 1.14 billion second-language users, reflecting its role in business, education, and digital communication.
The data also show that several African languages with relatively small native speaker bases, such as Swahili and Nigerian Pidgin, achieve high totals through second-language adoption, mirroring patterns seen with English.
The report shows Nigerian Pidgin’s rise is tied to urbanisation, regional trade, and the growth of Nigerian popular culture, particularly music and film, which have helped export the language beyond the country’s borders.
However, Pidgin remains largely an informal language, without official status in Nigeria, and is not widely used in formal education or government communication.
The top 25 languages ranking also includes Urdu, German, Japanese, Turkish, and Vietnamese, underscoring the mix of population size and second-language adoption in shaping global linguistic influence.