Previous Studies of the Elaboration of Igbo

It is remarkable that studies of the elaboration of Igbo are generally silent on the contributions of Christian institutions. One would expect that Emenanjo (1991), for instance, would at least mention the contribution of Christian institutions to the elaboration of Igbo. This is especially because his report also has a historical dimension and highlights language planning activities in Nigeria by both government and non-government agencies. His description of a typical language planning agency (LPA) in Nigeria covers individuals and institutions found in Christian organizations:

A typical LPA in Nigeria is a cooperative venture between government and the speakers of the language. Because it operates within given government directives, it holds within its membership government officials, linguists and literary people, language educators, educationists, traditional rulers, authors, writers, printers, publishers, the media people and all types of local people representing various interests – religious, inter-ethnic, intra-, and inter-state.

(Emenanjo 1991: 159, emphasis added)

Although Emenanjo (1991) mentions that these agents represent various interests including religious interests, his expatiation of the interests and contributions of the various agents and agencies does not overtly include those of any religious group. This is a

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huge omission because the contribution of Christian institutions, historically and in the present age, to the modernization of Igbo is too significant to be ignored. An illustration with the Watch Tower Bible and Tracts Society will suffice.

This Society organizes the Theocratic Ministry School Education, whose objective is to

“prepare all ‘faithful men,’ those who have heard God’s Word and proved their faith therein, to ‘be able to teach others’ . . . to the one end of making each one . . . better equipped to publicly present the hope that is within him.” (Watch Tower 2001: 5). Every member of this Society is expected to enrol free of charge in the program and, as my informant, Okoro Mark Ogbonnaya²⁷, explains, “nobody graduates from the school”. In other words, members are expected to regularly update their skills by continuous participation in the program.

People who attend this school are equipped with the following skills: listening and remembering, personal reading, studying, doing research, analysing and organizing, conversing, answering questions, putting thoughts down in writing (Watch Tower 2001: 7).

The manual for this education is the book Benefit from Theocratic Ministry School Education. The Watch Tower Society also runs this program in Igbo and the Igbo version of the manual is titled Rite Uru na Mmụta a na-Enweta n’Ụlọ Akwụkwọ Ije Ozi Ọchịchị Chineke.

The implication of having the program in Igbo is the reinforcement it has given to education in Igbo. Apart from departments of Igbo in tertiary institutions, some primary schools in Igboland, and secondary school classes where Igbo is taught as a subject, Igbo is not the language of instruction in any other formal contexts. So, the Watch Tower’s theocratic school expands the functions of Igbo by making it the language of instruction in a formal, educational and religious context. This school does not teach only religious education, it also teaches other skills, e.g., linguistic skills, that will make the students better teachers in Igbo. This requires developing the metalanguage of various domains. In a personal communication with me, Okoro Mark Ogbonnaya, a member of the church who attends the school, shares his experience with the school: “I learnt how to read, write and do research with Igbo, and then present it in public. I also learnt how to speak fluent Igbo without mixing it with English.” Although Ogbonnaya has a bachelor’s degree in Igbo Linguistics, he started writing literary works in Igbo before starting the degree program.

27 Male, late 20s

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Till date he has written 50 literary works in Igbo, with 18 of them already published.

According to him, he owes his skills in spoken and written Igbo to the theocratic school. So, the theocratic school also equips members with skills to write professionally in Igbo.

In addition to the theocratic ministry school education, the Watch Tower Society has also published an Igbo translation of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures as well as translations of numerous books, magazines and tracts of this society, published online and in hard copy. Thus, they should be grouped as part of Emenanjo’s (1991) language educators, authors/translators, printers and publishers.

The Watch Tower’s modernization activities also front their distinct religious ideology. As demonstrated in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, there are choices of terms made to front the ideology of the organization. Such choices include opting for direct lexical borrowing for certain Christian concepts for which other Bible translations coined new terms from existing words in Igbo. For example, the Society does not believe in the concept of “hell” and thus borrowed the original Greek/Hebrew terms that are usually translated as “hell”, namely:

“gehena”, “sheol”, and “hades”. Their choice of direct lexical borrowing in their Bible translations, including the Igbo version, weakens the indigenization efforts of other Christian groups that coined terms in Igbo for “hell”. Members of this group learn this and teach same to whoever they evangelize to. This reinforcement of certain semantic aspects of some terms and weakening of others is a form of elaboration embarked on by the institution.

That said, it is also telling that Emenanjo (1991) does not mention translators among his agents of planning alongside writers and publishers. For one, these are the pioneer language planning agents for many Nigerian languages. The written forms of Yoruba and Igbo, for instance, were developed by missionaries who translated the Bible into these languages, and over the years, they continued to produce texts in these languages. As highlighted in Chapter 1, the first Igbo literary standards were results of Bible translators, namely – Isuama Igbo and Union Igbo. Translations after these, done by native Igbo after independence from Britain, were done partly to modernize the language, and Chapter 6 demonstrates some of the methods adopted in this regard.

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Another key aspect of elaboration enhanced by translations is that certain genres emerged in Igbo because of translation. Oyali (2010, 2017a) has demonstrated that the corpus of religious, scientific and public service texts available in Igbo was created largely by translations from English. This is part of Haugen’s (1983) corpus planning. So, translators have been involved in elaborating Igbo from the beginning of scientific studies of Igbo till date, yet they have not been given due recognition by Igbo scholars.

That said, other previous studies on elaboration of Igbo approach it from various angles.

Nwachukwu (1983: 67-68), for instance, identifies four methods languages generally adopt for vocabulary expansion, namely: direct borrowing, coining new terms from existing terms in the language, creating new terms from foreign roots or items, and compounding of two or more words to create a new word. He then suggests that “Igbo scholars will need to examine the different processes of vocabulary expansion available and adopt whichever of these are found suitable” (1983: 68).

Unlike Nwachukwu (1983) who is more prescriptive, Emenanjo (1985) is descriptive, being an exploration of the different strategies adopted in the modernization of Igbo.

Specifically, Emenanjo highlights the modernization activities of the Igbo Standardization Committee (ISC), a committee of the Society for Promoting Igbo Language and Culture. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the SPILC was founded in 1949 and contributed a lot in the standardization of Igbo. Emenanjo (1985) emphasizes the progress the SPILC, through the ISC, has made, which includes expanding the Igbo numeral system as the traditional numeral system was no longer adequate for the times, and resolving some controversial issues around Standard Igbo orthography, spelling system and dialect. The aspect that is relevant to this study is the development of an Igbo metalanguage, a project that became necessary when tertiary institutions started teaching Igbo in the 1970s. In other words, the functional elaboration of Igbo by having Igbo language programs in tertiary institutions created the need to develop the metalanguage. Developing this metalanguage entailed utilizing resources from within Igbo and from outside the language. Emenanjo (1985: 87) stresses the fact that “[b]efore this [the intra- and extra-Igbo strategies] became formalized by the ISC, the language had been doing so from the very beginnings of its history”.

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According to Emenanjo (1985), the intra-Igbo strategy includes the following:

1. verb derivational morphology – this involves deriving new words from existing Igbo verb roots. Examples are 1) -da “sound” from which ụda “sound” is derived for

“tone” and “intonation”; 2) -de “write” from which ederede “something written” is derived for “passage”.

2. phrase derived morphology – here “phrase” is used to mean “a string of words/morphemes” (Emenanjo 1985: 88). This strategy covers the process of deriving new terms from erstwhile phrases, clauses and sentences. Examples include 1) asụsụ “language” + nka “art”, which are combined to give asụsụ nka

“figurative language”, and 2) akụkọ “story” + n’egwu “in a song”, combined to give akụkọneegwu “ballad”.

3. intra-lingual borrowing – this entails giving terms from different Igbo dialects special signification in Standard Igbo. The new signification takes different forms:

a. different dialectal terms for the same phenomenon are regarded as synonyms in Standard Igbo, e.g., akum and enyimmili for hippopotamus.

b. dialectal words are elevated as the Standard Igbo term, e.g., ezu “inland water” (Agulu dialect) for “lake” (Standard Igbo), and ifo “folk narrative”

(Central Igbo) for “folktale” (Standard Igbo).

c. dialectal phonological variants are given different functions in Standard Igbo.

For example, ọrụ (Central Igbo) and ọlụ (Onitsha Igbo) are dialectal phonological variants for the female genitalia and work. Standard Igbo separates their functions: ọrụ for the female genitalia and ọlụ for work.

The extra-Igbo strategy for modernization entails borrowing terms from other cultures with which Igbo has had direct or indirect contact. Indirect contact apparently refers to

“second-hand” borrowing, i.e. borrowing a word in a language through a mediating language with which Igbo has had direct contact. An example of indirect borrowing is alakuba “Muslim”, a corruption of the Arabic Allahu Akbar “God is great” borrowed through Hausa. Other borrowed items include mita “meter” (French) and piichi “pitch” (English).

Such borrowings are not only from languages spoken outside Nigeria. There are also items

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borrowed from neighbouring Nigerian languages, like oluku “fool” from Igala “friend”, and osikapa “rice” from cinkafa “rice” (Hausa).

The analysis of lexical processes in Bible translations in Chapter 4 shows that the Bible translators also adopted intra- and extra-Igbo strategies. The intra-Igbo strategies include derivations and compounding, including lexical blends, where an Igbo word is joined with a non-Igbo word to create a new term.

Some other studies on the elaboration of Igbo (Acholonu and Penfield (Okezie) 1980);

Ikekeonwu 1982; and Uzoezie 2011) focus on the activities triggered by the contact between Igbo and English. The major strategies explored in these studies are borrowings from English and the different methods adopted in integrating the borrowed items into Igbo. They also highlight some aspects of compounding and lexical blends. The major difference between these studies and Emenanjo (1985) is that the latter focuses on elaboration efforts by an institution, namely the ISC, while the former explore elaboration phenomena at the level of speakers of the language. In this study, I combine both approaches. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I analyse the elaboration activities of the Christian organizations engaged in Bible translations. However, in Chapter 7, I focus on how the speakers use these new features. This is done with the help of a questionnaire.