IGEDE LANGUAGE: A CALL FOR PROPER WRITING. “The limits of my language means, the limits of my world”-Ludwig Wittgenstein. Language is an extraordinary gift of God. It is part of what makes man fully human. In fact, Aristotle says “man is a rational being and that what sets him apart, what raises him above the animals, is that he has the ability to reason, and it is very clear that he cannot reason without language.” Aristotle was convinced, however, that meaning was no less an integral part of language than the sounds which bear the meaning and that language depends no less on the rational powers of man by which meanings are constructed than on the physiological organs by which sounds are formed.” Language is necessary in order for man to be a rational creature. In other words language is what made the growth of civilizations possible. The only means of understanding the great minds of the past is by studying the contemporary written documents of the time. Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse. Language is social by nature and thus inseparably connected with people who are its creators and users; it grows and develops together with the development of society. It arises and develops with the rise and development of a society. It dies when the society dies. The Igede people, one of the Nigerian ethnic groups in the lower Benue State inhabit predominantly Oju and Obi Local Government Areas. Igede people and language could be found in Konshisha and Gwer-West Local Government Areas of Benue State and Yala Local Government Area of Cross River State. Documentation of Igede language is essential for its vitality. Orthodoxly, Igede people had maintained strong oral traditions, and for sometimes a lot of efforts have been made by several persons and organizations to write the language. They include early missionaries like Evangelist Nwibo, Dick Bergman and Reverend John Adima. Organizations like Netherland Reformed Mission in Igede, Igede Language Planning Agency, Bible Society of Nigeria, Igede Bible Translation Project, Igede Writer’s Bureau and Association for Promoting Quality Education in Igedeland. Apart from the production of Christian related materials by several organizations, one could point out to the efforts of Professor John Enyi, the then OJU Local Government Chairman who organized a language conference that saw the production of Igede Gedegede. It was the formal public presentation of our approved orthography by Nigeria Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), which was a step further from the orthography that used “H” to denote high tone and absence of “H” to signifies low tone that accounted for names like ONAH, ODEH, ADIMAH, etc. the popular A, B,GB,D. The approved one made provision for the total and comprehensive way we write and speak. It has the A, B, BY, BW, CH, CHW, CHY, etc. It also made provision for tones, the high, the upper mid , the lower mid and the low, which are designated as Ogaku, oreji, amiragbo and ogwugu. With that you can make demarcation from words like “LA” which is to “HAVE, CHEW, GROW, MISSED A TARGET”. It made provision for dots in our vowels making it possible to demarcate between words like “OHE” which can be GOD or SOME. The dots and tones are placed on our vowels which are “E, I, O, U”, leaving “A” to be neutral. In recent times, apart from the Igede Bible Translation Project that saw to the completion of the Bible using the approved orthography; another organization that made a commendable effort in promoting the use of the approved orthography is Association for Promoting Quality Education in IgedeLand. They organized Igede Stakeholders Conference for three consecutive years drawing several professionals for paper presentation on the need to use the approved orthography and harmonized the writing of Igede language in all aspect of our formation. That conference also saw the upgrading of our numeracy by Professor Ejugwu Stephen Onah, the current Director General of National Mathematical Center Abuja and Mr. Isaac Odewu. Igede Writers Bureau has been at the vanguard of promoting proper writing and the utilization of the approved standard orthography. The Bureau is currently led by her Chairman Mr. Dickson Odoh, a Lecturer in the English department in the College of Education Oju and Ona Kingston O. as the Secretary. Igede is a tonal language and hence what you call should be written the same way is called. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs exist between syllables with the same segmental features consisting of consonants and vowels but different tones. They are selected individuals that had ventured into production of books in Igede language and are mindful to use the correct method of writing. Most prominent among them is the ground-breaking achievement recorded by Dr. Victor Oboh, a former lecturer with the University of Agriculture Makurdi and currently a staff with Central Bank of Nigeria Abuja in 2018 with the production if Igede Dictionary. But disappointingly, majorities write books and other materials without adhering to the approved orthography. The current status of Igede linguistic heritage is best described as endangered. A situation where people will wake up in the comfort of their libraries and turn out for public consumption documents that fall short of the writing standard of the Igede language. On the social media platforms, we have people writing wrongly for the view of the whole world. Some went as far as floating a platform where they teach Igede language to interested sons and daughters in diaspora without proper mastery of the standard way of writing. Worst still even within the land, you have people writing wrongly on billboards, signposts, names of places and persons or statement wrongly constructed and place conspicuously for everybody to see without sense of responsibility. Some wrong writings are placed on compact disc, cassettes, and other electronic media for distributions across the country. Some are printed on shirts, bags or wedding/birthday souvenirs. Such are given to people including non-indigenes. Some arrogantly said, “That they don’t have time for all the tone marking and doting.” Worthy of interest and notice, the Central Bank of Nigeria took all the pain to write on the currency with the three major languages the amount in a proper form, using dots and marks. The most commonly used factor in evaluating the vitality of a language is whether or not it is being transmitted correctly in all forms from one generation to the next. Preservation is very vital because of its capacity to promote the past ways of life that are useful to the contemporary societies. Undoubtedly, the past is essentially the key to the present and platform into the future. So if we get the writing wrong now, we can be very sure that after twenty years from now, the error will dominate the document space that it will be seen as the correct one. Language maintenance is partly done in speaking and majorly in writing. For now there is a variation and tension between speaking and writing. At the end, it is the owners of the language, not the outsiders that maintain or abandon the language. It is obvious that Igede language is poorly documented as most authors are resorting to either a wrong source or arrogantly refuse to go through the pains of dotting and tone marking. In general, literacy is directly linked with social and economic development. Needed are books and materials on all topics for various ages and social strata for socio-economic development. Your mother tongue is closely tied with your identity. It defines who you are in a major way and so is crucial to be properly documented. A language that can be maintained, perpetuated, or developed must have a complete and correct documentation pattern. This is because each language embodies unique cultural and ecological knowledge in it. It is also because languages are diverse. Documentation of such a language is important for several reasons: it enriches the human intellectual property, it presents a cultural perspective that may be new to our current knowledge, and the process of documentation often helps the language resource person to re-activate the linguistic and cultural knowledge. There is an established orthography, literacy tradition with grammars, dictionaries, texts, literatures, and a complete Bible. So writers of Igede language have no excuse to write wrongly. We must not only discipline ourselves but take full responsibility to pass a well-documented writings to posterity. Therefore, I call on the NATIONAL UNION OF IGEDE STUDENTS, our egghead and future leaders to lead in mobilization, synergy with relevant stakeholders to educate writers on the need for proper writing of our language in all platforms or domains. We all share the responsibility of ensuring that Igede language will be maintained and perpetuated into the future generations in a proper form. The reason why we must fortify our strategies to call all the stakeholders or people involved in writing to write according to pattern and standard.
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