From Masquerades to Modern Crises: The Resilience of the Igbo Ọ̀jà Surrogate Language

• Autores: Gerald Eze, Laura McPherson
• Localización: The handbook of multilingualism, identity, and language endangerment in Africa / coord. por Alireza Korangy, Evgeniya Gutova, 2025, ISBN 9789819647293, págs. 575-602
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Work on endangered languages has focused primarily on the loss of spoken linguistic codes used in everyday communication. But in many cases, language attrition begins in more specialized domains before spreading across the system as a whole, and the loss of these domains can have the same impacts on identity, degradation of cultural knowledge, and ramifications for linguistic typology as the loss of the larger language. One such practice, once well attested across many languages in Africa but now often highly endangered, is musical surrogate speech: using instruments to encode linguistic messages. This chapter focuses on the Igbo ọ̀jà, an aerophone whose surrogate messages have played an important role in warning the masquerade of obstacles and dangers in its path as well as guiding the audience towards deeper meanings in life. Since the colonial era, Igbo spiritual practices have been in decline, and the erosion of this spiritual center has had deleterious effects on other cultural and linguistic aspects of Igbo life, including speech surrogacy. We argue that revitalization of this surrogate tradition bolsters Igbo identity and provides another source of cultural pride and well-being in the face of modern obstacles and crises facing the Igbo and Nigerians more broadly, while also preserving a unique linguistic practice. The Igbo ọ̀jà serves as a case study to bring specialized linguistic traditions like musical surrogate languages into the discourse on language endangerment, in Africa and beyond.