Factors that Facilitate Multilingualism and Language Diversification

Multilingualism refers to a state whereby an individual can function in more than two languages. The aim of this paper is to discuss how dialectology and multilingualism give rise to linguistic diversity due to various factors. To verify this, works of different scholars were reviewed. It was observed that both multilingualism and dialectology give rise to linguistic diversity as both involve the use of language, whether the language is considered to be high/low variety, it does not matter as they contribute to the society. For instance, in a multilingual nation like Nigeria, according to Emenanjo (1990) and O’Reilly (2007), there are some linguistic phenomena (factors) that could lead to a language being diversified which include: language contact which is characterized by certain adverse effects on the native speakers’ use of the secondary language. A good example of language in such a contact situation is Nigeria, where English came in contact with numerous Nigerian languages. Basically the paper reviewed factors that lead to dialectology and language diversification.