Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin interpreting for asylum offices, courts and hospitals across the US, assigned by the language the speaker actually thinks in.
Prism Linguistics provides Nigerian interpreters, meaning Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin linguists, for asylum interviews, immigration court, criminal and civil hearings and medical appointments anywhere in the United States, in person, by phone or by video, together with certified English translation of Sharia and customary court records, sworn statements and recorded evidence.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Linguistics
Nobody speaks Nigerian. When a booking arrives with that word on it, the first job is to find out which of the country's languages the person actually uses at home, and Prism supplies interpreters in the four that account for nearly all US demand: Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin. Our office is in New York; an in-person assignment goes to a linguist based near the courtroom or clinic, and phone or video can usually start the same day.
The Nigerian-born population in the US is approaching half a million, with Texas and Maryland holding the largest shares and sizeable communities around Atlanta, New York, Chicago and Minneapolis. Yoruba is the biggest of the home languages, at roughly 166,000 speakers on the 2017-2021 American Community Survey, with Igbo near 104,000. Most of those people speak fluent English and will never need us. The ones who do are a grandmother admitted to a Houston hospital, a spouse at a green card interview in Baltimore, and, more than any other group, asylum applicants from the north who are far more precise in Hausa than in English.
Pidgin sounds like English. It is not. A judge or an asylum officer hears familiar words and decides no interpreter is needed, and a Nigerian Pidgin speaker is then asked about conditionals, sequences of events and dates in a grammar that is not theirs. Credibility findings turn on exactly those details. We treat Pidgin as a language in its own right and staff it with interpreters who work in it, not with an English speaker who can follow it socially.
Certification is patchy. California registers court interpreters in Igbo, and no state runs a certification exam in Hausa, Yoruba or Nigerian Pidgin, so a court needing one of those uses a qualified interpreter and usually asks a private agency to find one. That is where Prism comes in, and we say plainly that we are a private agency rather than a court-appointed vendor. Tell us the court and the language, and we confirm what the bench will accept before anyone travels.
A Yoruba-speaking mother visiting her children in Texas, an Igbo elder in a Maryland oncology unit: these patients are routinely handed a bilingual relative or left to manage in English that was never built for a diagnosis. Any hospital or clinic that takes federal funding has to provide a Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo or Pidgin interpreter at no cost to the patient, and staff often do not know the languages exist as separate options. Video covers most ward work; we send someone in person for a discharge talk with an elder or a psychiatric assessment.
Asylum is the largest slice of our Nigerian interpreting and the one with the least room for error. Claims from northern Nigeria are usually told in Hausa; claims from the south may come in Pidgin, Yoruba or Igbo, and the applicant's choice of language is itself a decision we help the attorney make at intake. At the interview the interpreter renders the account exactly, including the parts that seem off-topic to an American ear, because an officer weighing credibility needs the story the applicant told rather than a tidier one. We brief every interpreter to carry words, not to advocate.
Most Nigerian paperwork needs no translation at all, and we tell callers so before they spend money. National Population Commission birth certificates and Attestations of Birth, marriage certificates, police character certificates, school records and university transcripts are all issued in English, and USCIS accepts them as they stand. The documents that do need a certified translation are the ones written in a Nigerian language: Sharia court judgments and marriage records from the northern states, kept in Hausa with Arabic; customary court rulings recorded in Yoruba or Igbo; and, in asylum files, the letters, affidavits, voice messages and social media threads that support the claim, often in Pidgin.
Those last items are the hardest work in the file. A voice note in Hausa or Pidgin has to be transcribed, then translated, then labelled so that an officer can match the translation to the exhibit, and a threat that reads as a proverb in Yoruba has to be rendered with its force intact. Each carries a signed Certificate of Translation Accuracy. The full document service is described at certified translation.
Tell us the date, the city and the setting, or send a clear scan of the document. We reply with a fixed price and, for interpreting, a named linguist. Call +1 (833) 282 8883, email info@prismlinguistics.com, or use the quote form and you will hear back within 60 minutes during business hours.
Our only office is in New York, and our Nigerian interpreters work nationwide. For in-person work we assign someone based in or near the city. These are the areas where Nigerian work is concentrated; the full list of 288 cities is below it.
Prism Linguistics is rated 4.6 out of 5 across 67 client reviews for its interpreting and translation work in the United States. That is the company-wide figure; we do not publish a separate rating per language because there is no honest way to measure one. If a Nigerian assignment ever falls short, tell us and we put it right.