Igbo or Igbo proper, is a native language of the Igbo people, an ethnic group primarily located in southeastern Nigeria. There are approximately 20 million speakers that are mostly in
NigeriaNigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
and are primarily of
IgboIgbo people, also referred to as the Ibo, Ebo, Eboans or Heebo are an ethnic group living chiefly in southeastern Nigeria. They speak Igbo, which includes various Igboid languages and dialects; today, a majority of them speak English alongside Igbo as a result of British colonialism...
descent. Igbo is a national language of Nigeria. It is written in the Latin script, which was introduced by
British colonialistsThe British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
. Secret societies such as the Ekpe use the
NsibidiNsibidi is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that is apparently ideographic, though there have been suggestions that it includes logographic elements...
symbols which were invented by the
EjaghamEkoi people, also known as Ejagham, are an ethnic group in the extreme southeast of Nigeria and extending eastward into Northern Cameroon. Ekoid Bantu languages are spoken by many groups, including the Atam, Boki, Mbembe, Ufia, and Yako...
and were used to represent other languages like
EfikEfik , also known as Riverain Ibibio, is the native language of the Efik people of Nigeria, where it is a national language. It is the official language of the Cross River State in Nigeria.The name Efik is also used for Ibibio-Efik....
.
There are over 20 Igbo dialects. There is apparently a degree of dialect leveling occurring. A standard literary language was developed in 1972 based on the
OwerriOwerri is the capital of Imo State in Nigeria, set in the heart of the Igboland. Owerri consists of three Local Govern Areas including Owerri Municipal, Owerri North and Owerri West, it has an estimated population of about 400,000 as of 2006...
(Isuama) and
UmuahiaUmuahia is the capital of Abia State in southeastern Nigeria. Umuahia is located along the rail road that lies between Port Harcourt to Umuahia's south and Enugu city to its north. Umuahia has a population of 359,230 according to the 2006 Nigerian census. Umuahia's indigenous ethnic group are the...
(such as Ohuhu) dialects, though it omits the
nasalizationA nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation...
and
aspirationIn phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...
of those varieties. There are related
Igboid languagesIgboid languages constitute a branch of the Volta–Niger language family. It includes Ekpeye and the Igbo languages:*Ekpeye*Igbo: Igbo proper, Ikwerre, Ika, Izi , Ogba, and Ukwuani-Aboh-Ndoni,spoken mainly in southern Nigeria....
as well that are sometimes considered dialects of Igbo, the most divergent being
EkpeyeEkpeye is an ethnicity and people found in the niger delta region of southern nigeria n Ekpeye is an ethnicity and people found in the niger delta region of southern nigeria n Ekpeye is an ethnicity and people found in the...
. Some of these, such as
IkaIka may be:*Ika language , a variety of Igbo*Ika language , also known as Arhuaco...
, have separate standard forms.
History
The Igbo people first used
NsibidiNsibidi is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that is apparently ideographic, though there have been suggestions that it includes logographic elements...
ideogramAn ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
s invented by the neighboring
Ekoi peopleEkoi people, also known as Ejagham, are an ethnic group in the extreme southeast of Nigeria and extending eastward into Northern Cameroon. Ekoid Bantu languages are spoken by many groups, including the Atam, Boki, Mbembe, Ufia, and Yako...
for written communication. These ideograms existed among the Igbo and other related groups before the 16th century, but died out publicly after it became popular amongst secret societies such as the Ekpe, who then made Nsibidi a secret form of communication.
The first book to publish Igbo words was
Geschichte der Mission der Evangelischen Bruder auf den Carabischen , published in 1777. Shortly after wards in 1789,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah EquianoThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, first published in 1789, is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano.-Plot introduction:...
was published in London, England, written by
Olaudah EquianoOlaudah Equiano also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a prominent African involved in the British movement towards the abolition of the slave trade. His autobiography depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British lawmakers to abolish the slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807...
, a former slave, featuring 79 Igbo words. The narrative also illustrated various aspects of Igbo life based in detail, based on Olaudah Equiano's experiences in his hometown of Essaka.
Things Fall ApartThings Fall Apartis a 1958 English language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African...
is a novel written by Nigerian
Chinua AchebeAlbert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe popularly known as Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic...
published in 1959. The novel depicts influences of British colonialism and Christian
missionariesA missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...
on a traditional Igbo community during an unspecified time in the late 19th or early 20th century. The bulk of the novel takes place in Umuofia, one of nine villages on the lower River Niger Niger in Igbo land southeastern Nigeria. It is possibly the most popular and renowned novel that deals with the Igbo and their traditional life.
Central Igbo, the dialect form gaining widest acceptance, is based on the dialects of two members of the Ezinihitte group of Igbo in Central Owerri Province between the towns of Owerri and Umuahia, Eastern Nigeria. From its proposal as a literary form in 1939 by Dr.
Ida C. WardIda Caroline Ward was a British linguist working mainly on African languages who did influential work in the domains of phonology and tonology. Her 1933 collaboration with Diedrich Hermann Westermann, Practical Phonetics for Students of African languages, was reprinted many times...
, it was gradually accepted by missionaries, writers, and publishers across the region. In 1972, the
Society for Promoting Igbo Language and CultureThe Society for Promoting Igbo Language and Culture was founded in 1949 by Frederick Chidozie Ogbalu for the promotion of the Igbo language and culture and has since created a standard dialect for Igbo....
(SPILC), a nationalist organisation which saw Central Igbo as an imperialist exercise, set up a Standardisation Committee to extend Central Igbo to be a more inclusive language. Standard Igbo aims to cross-pollinate Central Igbo with words from Igbo dialects from outside the "Central" areas, and with the adoption of loan words.
The wide variety of spoken dialects has made agreeing on a standardized
orthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
and
dialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
of Igbo difficult. The current Onwu alphabet, a compromise between the older
Lepsius alphabetThe Standard Alphabet by Lepsius is a Latin alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius to write African languages. Published 1855 and in a revised edition in 1863, it was comprehensive but it was not used much as it contains a lot of diacritic marks and therefore was difficult to read, write and...
and a newer alphabet advocated by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC), was agreed to in 1962.
Vocabulary
Igbo, like many other West
African languagesThere are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
, has borrowed words from European languages, mainly
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. Example loanwords include the Igbo word for blue [
blu] and operator [
opareto].
Many names in Igbo are actually fusions of older original words and phrases. For example, one Igbo word for vegetable leaves is
akwükwö nri, which literally means "leaves for eating" or "vegetables". Green leaves are called
akwükwö ndu, because
ndu means "life". Another example is train (
ugbo igwe), which comes from the words
ugbo (vehicle, craft) and
igwe (iron, metal); thus a locomotive train is vehicle via iron (rails); a car,
ugbo ala; vehicle via land and an aeroplane
ugbo elu;
vehicle via air.
Words may also take on multiple meanings. Take for example the word
akwükwö.
Akwükwö originally means "leaf" (as on a tree), but during and after the colonization period,
akwükwö also came to be linked to "paper," "book," "school," and "education", to become respectively
akwükwö édémédé,
akwükwö ogugu,
ulo akwükwö,
mmuta akwükwö. This is because printed paper can be first linked to an organic leaf, and then the paper to a book, the book to a school, and so on. Combined with other words,
akwükwö can take on many forms; for example,
akwükwö ego means "printed money" or "bank notes," and
akwükwö ejị éjé ijẹ means "passport."
Proverbs
Proverbs and idiomatic expressions are highly valued by the Igbo people and proficiency in the language means knowing how to intersperse speech with a good dose of proverbs.
Chinua AchebeAlbert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe popularly known as Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic...
(in
Things Fall ApartThings Fall Apartis a 1958 English language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African...
) describes proverbs as "the
palm oilPalm oil, coconut oil and palm kernel oil are edible plant oils derived from the fruits of palm trees. Palm oil is extracted from the pulp of the fruit of the oil palm Elaeis guineensis; palm kernel oil is derived from the kernel of the oil palm and coconut oil is derived from the kernel of the...
with which words are eaten". Proverbs are widely used in the traditional society to describe, in very few words, what could have otherwise required a thousand words. Proverbs may also become euphemistic means of making certain expressions in the Igbo society, thus the Igbo have come to typically rely on this as avenues of certain expressions.
Sounds
Igbo is a
tonal languageTone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
with two distinctive tones, high and low. In some cases a third, downstepped high tone is recognized. The language's tone system was given by
John GoldsmithJohn Anton Goldsmith is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in Linguistics and Computer Science. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he obtained his B.A. in 1972, and at MIT, where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics...
as an example of suprasegmental phenomena that go beyond the linear model of
phonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
laid out in
The Sound Pattern of EnglishThe Sound Pattern of English is a 1968 work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. It presents a comprehensive view of the phonology of English, and stands as a landmark both in the field of phonology and in the analysis of the English language...
. Due to this tone system a word in igbo pronounced with a slightly different tone will result in an entirely different meaning, example is "AKWA" which could mean "cry", "bed", "egg", "cloth".
The language features
vowel harmonyVowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
with two sets of vowels distinguished by
pharyngealThe human pharynx is the part of the throat situated immediately posterior to the mouth and nasal cavity, and anterior to the esophagus and larynx. The human pharynx is conventionally divided into three sections: the nasopharynx , the oropharynx , and the laryngopharynx...
cavity size described in terms of retracted tongue root (RTR). These vowels also occupy different places in vowel space: [i ɪ̙ e a u ʊ̙ o ɒ̙] (the last commonly transcribed [ɔ̙], in keeping with neighboring languages). For simplicity, phonemic transcriptions typically choose only one of these parameters to be distinctive, either RTR as in the chart at right and Igbo orthography (that is, as /i i̙ e a u u̙ o o̙/), or vowel space as in the alphabetic chart below (that is, as /i ɪ e a u ʊ o ɔ/).
In some dialects, such as Enu-Onitsha Igbo, the doubly articulated /ɡ͡b/ and /k͡p/ are realized as a voiced/devoiced bilabial implosive. The approximant /ɹ/ is realized as an
alveolar tapThe alveolar flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar flaps is .-Definition:...
[ɾ] between vowels as in
árá. The Enu-Onitsha Igbo dialect is very much similar to Enuani spoken among the Igbo-Anioma people in Delta State.
caption | Consonant phonemes of Standard Igbo
|
BilabialIn phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
|
Labio-dental |
Dental/AlveolarAlveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...
|
Post-alveolar |
PalatalPalatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
|
VelarVelars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
|
Labial-velarLabial–velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips. They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term that can also refer to labialized velars, such as and the approximant ....
|
GlottalGlottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
|
| plain |
labio. |
| Nasal A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
|
m |
|
n |
|
ɲ |
ŋ |
ŋʷ |
|
|
| Plosive |
p |
b |
|
t |
d |
|
|
k |
ɡ |
kʷ |
ɡʷ |
k͡p |
ɡ͡b |
|
| Affricate Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...
|
|
|
|
tʃ |
dʒ |
|
|
|
|
|
| Fricative Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...
|
|
f |
|
s |
z |
ʃ |
|
|
|
ɣ |
|
|
ɦ |
| Approximant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...
|
central |
|
|
|
ɹ |
j |
|
|
w |
|
| lateral |
|
|
|
l |
|
|
|
|
|
Syllables are of the form (C)V (optional consonant, vowel) or N (a syllabic nasal). CV is the most common syllable type. Every syllable bears a tone. Consonant clusters do not occur. The semivowels
j and
w can occur between consonant and vowel in some syllables. The semi-vowel in CjV is analyzed as an underlying vowel 'ị', so that
-bịa is the phonemic form of
bjá 'come'. On the other hand, 'w' in CwV is analysed as an instance of labialization; so the phonemic form of the verb
-gwá 'tell' is /-ɡʷá/.
Writing system
The most commonly-used alphabet for Igbo is
Önwu (/oŋwu/). It is presented in the following table, with the
International Phonetic AlphabetThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
equivalents for the characters:
Önwu alphabet
| Letter |
AA is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...
|
BB is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:...
|
Ch Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet and Uyghur. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no...
|
DD is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the...
|
E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
|
FF is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club...
|
GG is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...
|
Gb |
| Pronunciation (IPA) |
/a/ |
/b/ |
/tʃ/ |
/d/ |
/e/ |
/f/ |
/ɡ/ |
/ɓ~ɡ͡ɓ/ |
| |
| Letter |
Gh Gh is a digraph found in many languages.-English:In English, ⟨gh⟩ historically represented . In modern English, ⟨gh⟩ is almost always either silent or pronounced...
|
Gw |
HH .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....
|
II is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...
|
ỊI is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...
|
J Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...
|
KK is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA....
|
Kp |
| Pronunciation |
/ɣ/ |
/ɡʷ/ |
/ɦ/ |
/i/ |
/ɪ̙/ |
/dʒ/ |
/k/ |
/ƥ~k͡p/ |
| |
| Letter |
Kw |
LŁ or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...
|
MM is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water...
|
NN is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet...
|
Nw |
Ny |
ṄN is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet...
|
OO is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...
|
| Pronunciation |
/kʷ/ |
/l/ |
/m/ |
/n/ |
/ŋʷ/ |
/ɲ/ |
/ŋ/ |
/o/ |
| |
| Letter |
ỌO is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...
|
P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words...
|
RR is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R...
|
SS is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...
|
Sh Sh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of S and H.-English:In English, sh usually represents . The exception is in compound words, where the s and h are not a digraph, but pronounced separately, e.g. hogshead is hogs-head , not *hog-shead...
|
TT is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets...
|
U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
|
Ụ U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
|
| Pronunciation |
/ɔ̙/ |
/p/ |
/ɹ/ |
/s/ |
/ʃ/ |
/t/ |
/u/ |
/ʊ̙/ |
| |
| Letter |
V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
| WW is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
| YY is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound...
| ZZ is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal...
|
| Pronunciation |
/v/ |
/w/ |
/j/ |
/z/ |
The graphemes ⟨gb⟩ and ⟨kp⟩ are described both as coarticulated ɡ͡b and k͡p and as implosives, so both values are included in the table.
⟨m⟩ and ⟨n⟩ each represent two phonemes: a nasal consonant and a syllabic nasal.
Tones are sometimes indicated in writing, and sometimes not. When tone is indicated, low tones are shown with a grave accent over the vowel, for example ⟨a⟩ → ⟨à⟩, and high tones with an acute accent over the vowel, for example ⟨a⟩ → ⟨á⟩.
Usage in the Diaspora
With the devastating effects of the
Atlantic slave tradeThe Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries...
, Igbo was consequently spread by enslaved Igbo individuals throughout slave colonies in the Americas. These colonies include the United States, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Belize, Barbados and The Bahamas among many other colonies. Examples can be found in Jamaican Patois: the pronoun /unu/, used for 'you (plural)', is taken from Igbo,
Red eboe describes a fair skinned black person because of the reported account of a fair or yellowish skin tone among the Igbo.
Soso meaning
only comes from Igbo .
The word
Bim, a name for Barbados, was commonly used by enslaved
BarbadiansBarbadians are people originating on the Caribbean island of Barbados whether they live there or in the Barbadian diaspora.Rihanna is by far the most popular Barbadian on the planet.-Diaspora:...
(
BajanBarbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...
s). This word is said to derive from the Igbo language, derived from
bi mu (or either
bem,
Ndi bem,
Nwanyi ibem or
Nwoke ibem) (My people), but it may have other origins (see: Barbados etymology).
See also
- Igbo people
Igbo people, also referred to as the Ibo, Ebo, Eboans or Heebo are an ethnic group living chiefly in southeastern Nigeria. They speak Igbo, which includes various Igboid languages and dialects; today, a majority of them speak English alongside Igbo as a result of British colonialism...
- Igbo mythology
Ọdinani, also Ọdinala, Omenala,Omenana, Odinana or Ọmenani is the traditional cultural beliefs and practises of the Igbo people of West Africa...
- Igbo music
Igbo music is the music of the Igbo people, who are indigenous to the southeastern part of Nigeria. The Igbo traditionally rely heavily on percussion instruments such as the drum and the gong, which are popular because of their innate ability to provide a diverse array of tempo, sound, and...
- Delta Ibo
Anioma, commonly referred to as Delta Ibo or sometimes Enuani, comprising towns and communities located in Delta State, South-South region of Nigeria. Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan has been the Executive Governor of the State since 2007...
- Ukwuani
Ụkwụànì are an Igbo group in Delta and Rivers states in Nigeria.-Language:The Ụkwụànì dialect, which is intelligible with the dialects of Aboh and Ndoni, is considered a dialect of the Igbo language.-Economy:...
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