A fact about Nigeria that genuinely surprised me is that our country has hundreds of living languages. I'm an engineering student in Ibadan, and I'd always known we had Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, plus English, but I assumed the others were just a few dozen small dialects.
I found out last year during a general studies module at university. Our lecturer, Dr Adeyemi, put a map on the screen covered in tiny coloured patches, each one representing a different language group. Then she told us the number, and the whole lecture hall went quiet for a moment.
Afterwards I mentioned it to my younger brother and to my grandmother, who speaks Yoruba and a bit of Ijebu. My brother didn't believe me and looked it up on his phone right there at the dinner table.
The reason it shocked me is that I've lived here my whole life and never really thought about it. In the city everyone mixes English, Pidgin and Yoruba, so you don't notice how varied the country is. Learning that number made me realise how many communities have their own songs, stories and ways of naming things that I know nothing about. It also explained some things, like why English is so important as a shared language in offices and schools. To be honest, it made me feel a bit embarrassed, but also quite proud, because that kind of diversity is rare. Now I'm trying to learn at least a few greetings in Hausa and Igbo when I meet classmates from other regions.