The department of Linguistics and African Languages was established in the year 2004. The department was actually housed in the department of English and Literary Studies for two academic sessions. The department then took off fully in 2006/2007 session. The department runs two main programmes, Linguistics and Arabic.

The department offers 82 courses of which 38 are in Linguistics and 44 in Arabic. These programmes are run at the undergraduate level. B.A. (Hons) Linguistics and B.A. (Hons) Arabic. The location of the University of Abuja gives the students the opportunity to apply their training in theoretical Linguistics as well as the language of the Middle Belt such as Nupe, Tiv, Gbagi, Idoma etc. It is expected that these students acquire skills in French language.