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KANO, Nigeria—Hundreds of languages are spoken in this country: So which one do you teach a parrot?

It is a decision the pet shops of Nigeria confront every time a talking bird lands in their possession. Last year, a babbling grey parrot arrived at Salisu Sani’s bird stand in this northern city.

There was only one problem. She spoke one of the country’s lesser-known tongues.

“I told her: ‘This is a rubbish language. Try my own,’ ” recalled the lifelong parrot distributor, who spent weeks teaching the animal greetings in Hausa, a more widely spoken vernacular.

Nigeria is one of the world’s easier places to buy a parrot—the garrulous birds are a status symbol for some civil servants. In traffic jams, young salesmen approach car windows holding up cages with birds inside. African greys sell for about $60.

But they sell closer to $100 if you can get them to speak.

The question is what Nigerians want their pets to say. The country’s 182 million people speak 520 different languages, according to Ethnologue, an atlas of the world’s linguistic boundaries, published by the International Linguistics Center in Dallas. Church services drag for hours as deacons translate their pastor’s sermons into three, sometimes four languages. Customer service lines begin with a plethora of options: one for English, two for Hausa, three for Yoruba, four for Igbo.

It makes the parrot business complicated, too.

A parrot will make almost any noise you throw its way. Leave one by a doorbell and it might say “ding-dong.” A rising number of pet parrots re-create the sound of their owner’s ringtone.

So parrots raised among a polyglot populace often wind up speaking the wrong language.

A few years ago in this northern city, Salim Mohammad’s cohort sourced a Cameroonian grey through Lagos, 500 miles to the south. By the time it arrived in Kano, it had picked up Yoruba, a language spoken only in Nigeria’s south. It took several months of standing on the side of the road with the caged bird before a motorist agreed to buy it.

The opposite problem confronts Murphy Taiwo’s Yoruba-speaking parrot peddlers down in Lagos. None of his half dozen bird handlers speak Hausa, but many of his customers do.

Three hundred miles north, in Abuja, parrot tender Awula Salisu and his co-workers are all Hausa-speakers. They coach parrots on sayings like “ina kwana” (good morning) or “aku” (parrot). But most of their customers speak Yoruba. Frequently, shoppers walk away, unhappy with the selection.

The 37-year-old bird handling veteran could, of course, hire a Yoruba person to come train his parrots. But that person wouldn’t be able to join in on their conversations.

“We are Hausa here,” he said. “He wouldn’t belong.”

The language barrier means some pollys can accidentally squawk parrot profanities.

In Kano, Mr. Mohammad bought a secondhand parrot from an American or possibly British expat leaving Nigeria. When he peered into the cage, the bird blared back: “Waka, waka!”

In Hausa, this is a very bad thing for a bird to say. Roughly translated, it means “your mother.”

“That one was misbehaving,” Mr. Mohammad recalled. “It took a long time to see."

Nigeria isn’t the only place where languages and parrots fly around with equal abandon. By a quirk of geography, parrots tend to live in the most multilingual corners of the world: the Amazon, Indonesia, Central Africa. In these lands, people sometimes struggle to communicate with the village a few miles away.

As it turns out, parrots face some of the same language barriers. There are untold hundreds of different parrot dialects. For example, birds in different parts of Costa Rica don’t use the same greetings, termed “contact calls” by ornithologists.

“In the north, they sound like ‘wah, wah! wah, wah!’ ” said Tim Wright, professor at New Mexico State University’s biology department. “Then in the south, they sound like ‘weep! weep! weep!’ ”

“After many years, I’ve managed to learn these,” he added.

Like humans, parrots tend to stick with birds that speak the same language. It’s how they create close-knit communities that rely on each to find food and avoid danger.

But dropped into a new environment, parrots—especially young ones—will try to crack the local vocabulary. Birds that grow in bilingual forests, where multiple parrot dialects are spoken, are also good at code switching between groups.

“That sociology is a very important part of being a parrot: It’s a survival strategy,” said Rowan Martin, researcher at the World Parrot Trust. “It’s really calls that promote group cohesion, so they’re all saying ‘I’m here! How are you?’ And it’s also saying. ‘I’m one of you.’ ”

This is why parrots mimic human voice, once caged and raised around humans. They’re trying to fit in with us.

These days, West Africa’s languages are slowly disappearing—dozens of Nigerian languages are spoken by less than 100 people. Parrots seem headed down the same path.

The parrots that survive find themselves in a noisier setting. The several birds that Atef Fawaz has owned in Kano have made the sound of cars, honking at his gate. One made the shrill beep that his fuse box emits anytime the power goes out, as it does daily: “He memorized that sound very well,” said Mr. Fawaz, a Lebanese businessman.

At Awula Salisu’s pet stand in Abuja, police routinely blare past, sirens wailing as they escort politicians across the capital. So his birds often make siren sounds.

In August, he received a bird that spoke Igala, the mother tongue of less than 1% of Nigerians. Mr. Salisu figured he would be stuck with the animal for months.

But days later, an Igala-speaking businessman showed up, delighted to find a bird that could talk his language. The man drove away with a broad smile.

Of course, Mr. Salisu had no idea what the bird—or its owner—were saying to each other, he said: “There are too many languages in this country.”

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com