1.Yoruba
2.Hausa
3.Igbo
in that order of simplicity
Speaking from experience.

Horton4real: na igbo hard pass,yoruba 2 simple.she you no know se dos foreigners prefer learning yoruba to other nigerian language.

toddler

ChinenyeN: The hardest would have to be Igbo. Aside from the artificial dialect, there is no generally accepted standard. Then, even after learning the artificial dialect, you come to find out that it is practically useless to you, since most native speakers don't actively communicate in it. Instead, you hear tongues, accents, phonemes and even lexicon that are simply divergent.

Example; You learn 'ihere' (shame), based on the artificial dialect, only to come across a speaker saying 'whnuwhnerne'. This is just one of countless examples.

Don't get me wrong, each language has its selling points for difficulty, but the fact that Igbo can attest to such high degree of divergence, in such a comparatively close proximity, puts it a step or so above the rest (in my opinion), because learning 'Igbo' (the artificial dialect, doesn't mean you can speak with others, and that is the point of learning a language to begin with.

Can you speak and understand other languages to know that Igbo is more difficult? The same thing exists in every language. Go to Ibadan and hear how they speak compared with the adulterated Lagos Yoruba.

I know of a yoruba boy who learnt how to speak igbo fluently in lagos by growing up with igbo friends,,and my dad has stayed for 43 years in lagos and can't speak yoruba at all,can we now say that igbo is easy and yoruba difficult?

I don't know but I'm sure
Yoruba is the easiest. All you need do is master the art of shouting

Difficulty in a language varies from person to person. Majority of people who say Igbo language is difficult have not made any attempt to learn but have given up hope already. A language cannot be difficult when you have not even made a concerted effort to learn it.

nekaa: Igbo is the hardest with yoruba being the easiest. I had an igbo teacher(for extar lessons at home, when i didnt av for regular subjects) back then buh I still find it hard to understand it (nobody is talking about speaking yet o), buh juss listening to ma mum speak yoruba I learnt it.

Your dad needs to do his homework well.It is not to be left for a lesson teacher.A child,anyway,learns faster the language spoken to him/her by mummy.
If your mum had interest to learn Igbo through your dad, your case could have been different.I guess your dad is Igbo and mummy Yoruba.
Mine is slightly different....husband and wife from different states in igboland.When daddy talks to the kids in his dialect from one state,mummy talks to them in another dialect from another state.Confusion you may say.But solution was to talk to them with central igbo,brings in a cousin from daddy's side to live with them,daddy talks to mummy in his dialect always,kids visit villa often,etc.
You may wonder why all the stress....yes,I do not joke with my language because that is the root of every culture.
It's easy for us to copy 'white-man' culture because we are abandoning our language for theirs.I think it is more prominent with the igbo race and it is extremely painful.
We can do something about it.Let no one give me that 'who cares?' mentality.
Thank you.

I think yoruba.
But i just have to learn it because from next month I'll really need it

Andre Uweh: Igbo language.
Akwa-egg, akwa-cry, akwa-wrapper.
Nrubeisi-obedience, nrubeisi-overgrown hair.

ɑ̤̥̈̊п̥̥̲̣̣̣d̶̲̥̅̊ also Akwa- Bed

dabrake: I don't know but I'm sure
Yoruba is the easiest. All you need do is master the art of shouting

Do Yorubas shout like the Igbo people that every opportunity will shout Chineke or Eh!.

You have left the tread al because of your ethno jingoism.

Na wa o.

obadiah777: HAS TO BE IGBO. YOU NEED TO HAVE STRONG JAW MUSCLES TO SPEAK IGBO

u no lie na true

If it is central yoruba, igbo and hausa, then its hausa, but for dialect, na Yoruba o. Ikale language in Ondo is one language I fear in yoruba land. Even modakeke yoruba sef dey one kind. I speak the three languages to a reasonable extent and I found hausa easiest.

Igbo is the hardest. You must have smoken Igbo to wanna learn how to speak Igbo.

It should be igbo for sure.

Efik,,Akwa ibom should be the easiest

without wasting time... Hausa is d easiest to speak nd understand follow by yoruba...nd igbo is d hardest in both speaking nd understanding... Let me back up my disposition with emperical envidence...i ve an igbo nd hausa as fwends, so i try to use this opportunity to understand d 2 languages... I do meet my igbo fwend to teach me igbo language or in some cases i do ask him to interprete certain words for me in igbo, bt each time he teach me after some minutes i easily forgets every thing i lernt frm him... D same cenareo goes wth my hausa fwend...anything he(hausa fwend) tot me stick to my brain with ease... Igbo language get as he be...

If you say Yoruba is easy base on they type of yoruba lagosians speak then u are WRONG. Talk to a typical yoruba from Ibadan or from Ile-ife. Lagosians often code-mix their yoruba with english or pidgin eng. I find hausa as the easiest. Yoruba is easy when you live with yorubas and not when you try to learn it consciously and I think this is the same case with the igbo language.

I think Igbo's the hardest among the 3 languages.

planetuzor: Yoruba lang ehhh!!!!
Ogùn(Medicine)Ò gùn(Charm)
Ogun( War)Ògùn(State) Ògún
(God of iron)Ó gun(Stab)Ogún(T
wenty)Òógùn(Swe at)Ogún
(Property)

épko (red oil,grandnut oil, petrol, diesel, kerosine). . . .
When you have one word for different things how would someone not find it difficult to learn.

No insult pls. If you think other 2 major languages are the hardest lets have your proves.

all languages have such. Yoruba is a very easy language likewise hausa. Igbo is a no go. By merely living in the north or west even Lagos you get to learn their languages but igbos are something else, they even consciously try to ensure you do not learn. They make you feel unwanted and create an air of rejection around you. Its not a language I even want to learn, it adds no value in the end unlike yoruba and hausa.

Uhm, can't say but i think Yoruba is definitely easier than Hausa. Spent a large part of my teens and adult hood UpNorth/MiddleBelt and I'm still pretty useless in Hausa. I catch more flows in Yoruba, but i guess that's probably cos my job for the past one year has involved communicating extensively with hard core Yorubas. I wasn't raised up with Igbo but over the years I've grown to understand it very well; I'll get you cracking up in laughter when i attempt to speak it in detail though. But God so good and the Holy Spirit over shadowing me I speak in tongues perfectly. Praise the Lord! ;-)

blink182: all languages have such. Yoruba is a very easy language likewise hausa. Igbo is a no go. By merely living in the north or west even Lagos you get to learn their languages but igbos are something else, they even consciously try to ensure you do not learn. They make you feel unwanted and create an air of rejection around you. Its not a language I even want to learn, it adds no value in the end unlike yoruba and hausa.

ibu ozu lere ere,onye gwara gi ihe ndi a?

the most difficult language among the three is ofcourse Igbo because even 95% of igbos can even speaks Igbo language without adding it English so if not that I have seen with my eyes a man from urualla town whom since I know him till today he had never spoke engligbo , he will speak only Igbo without adding even yes or no for the whole day, that is why I believed maybe 5% of Igbo peoples can speak only Igbo language without mixing it English , so my point is many Igbo peoples speaks engligbo and not pure Igbo language

Andre Uweh: Igbo language.
Akwa-egg, akwa-cry, akwa-wrapper.
Nrubeisi-obedience, nrubeisi-overgrown hair.

akwa - bed,

Lordave: It should be either Igbo or Yoruba. In Igbo we have Igwe-king, Igwe-bicycle, Igwe-iron, Igwe as in Igwe mmadu- multitude. Akwa-wears, Akwa-egg, Akwa-cry, Akwa-bed and Akwa mmiri-bridge.

AKWA-NMIRRI = TOWEL

Eze Promoe: Actually the simplest among all is Hausa language, i'm not from there but my brother went for Youth service in Kano, just within that space of one to two years, he speaks Hausa like he's from there. Igbo and Yoruba are both hard because it's tonal. I was born in Ifako/Ijaiye and lived there for 7 years but the only word i know the meaning is come and some few other words. Concerning Igbo, it depends on the dialect which you're learning from. I'm from Anambra state. It took me just 1 year of schooling in my hometown to learn how to speak and write in Igbo language but when i came to Rivers state even after spending all my secondary school life there i couldn't speak half of the Ikwerre (one of the Igbo dialect). So it depends on the dialect. The central Igbo is the easiest form of Igbo.

I actually learnt Igbo by learning Ikwerre first. I actually helped. But now i can't speak Ikwerre any longer except for a few phrase like "Bia Mbra bra", "e zega pele?" etc

Otu toto. Otu 1

HAH: I agree and disagree on your views. yes to me too igbo is the hardest but the easiest is hausa, cos i have seen many corpers who just spent 1 year in the north learning how to speak hausa at least the basic communication, though yoruba is also easy is not as easy as hausa and one thing I noticed is that the yoruna language spoken in lagos particularly is most adultrated with english which make any by stander to pick something out of a conversation.

One month in camp in Katsina I could speak basic hausa. Hausa is indisputably the easiest! Hardest.....well, it depends on a lot. My friend now speaks Igbo quite intelligibly just cos he got an Igbo gf of about 4 months now.

HAH: I agree and disagree on your views. yes to me too igbo is the hardest but the easiest is hausa, cos i have seen many corpers who just spent 1 year in the north learning how to speak hausa at least the basic communication, though yoruba is also easy is not as easy as hausa and one thing I noticed is that the yoruna language spoken in lagos particularly is most adultrated with english which make any by stander to pick something out of a conversation.

Qite on point...100%

Jah Man: I do not understand where you and Chinenye are getting your confusion from.
Like any other major language,there is what we call 'central Igbo' which is what is taught in Igbo Language in colleges.It is an amalgam of different local dialects in the geographical entity called Igboland.It is also expected that every Igbo indigene that has average education understands that.
Can Chinenye explain to me what is meant by 'artificial'?
Ehihie is not the same as evening odumchi.Ehihie(central Igbo) is rather afternoon.
Evening is 'anyasi' or 'mgbede'(central igbo), abani or abali(central igbo)=night.ututu(central igbo)=morning.
I have tried as much as possible to understand most local dialects in igboland excpet the 'okpoto' language in Ebonyi state which is extremely difficult.If you listen to those hawkers on 3rd mainland bridge,you may not know they are discussing in igbo.I know that because I lived around that area for 2 years.

Thanks for correcting me there. I had one thing in mind and wrote another. What I meant to write was mgbede instead of ehihe. But at the same time, even ehihe has its own variations which are ukori and ukorli.

In Imo, some call evening udirishi while in parts of Anambra some call it uchichi. So far, that's seven names for the same word...

I speak the 3 languages and I tell u sumfin,igbo is not hard to learn at all.. The easiet language is Hausa,hausa is so easy to learn follow by igbo.. Yoruba is one hard language. The reason u fink yoruba is easy is because u stay in lagos and picked it up.. When in lagos,its easy to understand what they are saying but if u want to know yoruba is hard,go to other yoruba states and see for urself.. There is the central igbo which is been taught in schools,that is all u need,cos where ever u go,u can communicate well with people and be understood

lol most of my students are finding it hard to learn Yoruba, but they love it lol

@OP

Most of those words are not the same words. O gun is two different words, while Ogun is one.

If you can't learn the tone marks in Yoruba, you may not be able to fluently speak Yoruba.