Natural language is a human-specific symbolic system for expressing meaning. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), however, is an approach to studying linguistic meaning both in isolation and in context. This study uses quantitative analysis to examine the Nigerian National Pledge and the revived anthem Nigeria, We Hail Thee, using the approach developed by Wierzbicka (1972, 1996) and extended by Goddard (2010). NSM proposes that all human languages share a core set of universal concepts known as semantic primes, which provide a culture independent framework for analysing meaning. The research examines the official English versions of the Pledge and Anthem, coding lexical items into semantic primes and classifying them into the following categories: Substantives Actions/Events, Evaluation, Relational, Existence/Possession, and Mental/Experiential states. Quantitative procedures involve frequency counts and percentage distributions to identify dominant semantic features, as well as comparative analysis to determine differences between the two texts. The findings reveal that the pledge is dominated by first-person singular pronouns (I) and action related primes (do, serve, defend), which foreground individual devotion and moral responsibility, while the anthem contains more first-person plural pronouns (we, our) and relational primes (same, other), which highlight collective identity and solidarity. Both texts make consistent use of evaluation primes (good, bad, honour, justice), confirming a shared moral orientation. The results demonstrate that devotion and collective identity are complementary dimensions of Nigeria’s national symbols. The study contributes to pragmatic and semantic scholarship by showing that quantitative NSM analysis provides empirical evidence of how ritualised national texts articulate universal human values while addressing the challenge of unity in a plural society.
