Ibibio

Ibibio is spoken mainly in Akwa Ibom State in south-southern Nigeria, and by related communities in neighbouring parts of Cross River and Rivers states. It is closely related to Efik, both belonging to the Ibibio-Efik group of Cross River languages, and the two share much vocabulary and structure, but they are generally regarded as distinct languages with their own literary and community identities rather than dialects of a single language, and Efik historically served as the regional lingua franca and language of early Christian mission and print in the area even though Ibibio has more first-language speakers today. Ibibio is used in regional radio broadcasting in Akwa Ibom and in church services, and there is a growing body of published material including Bible translations, though it has a smaller footprint in national television and film than Nigeria's three largest languages. It is tonal, with dialect variation across the Akwa Ibom area, and its oral culture includes proverbs, praise names and masquerade traditions such as Ekpo. As with many Cross River societies, Ibibio-speaking communities historically had access to Nsibidi, an indigenous ideographic sign system used for record-keeping, secret-society communication and decoration, though Nsibidi is a separate symbolic tradition rather than a script for writing the Ibibio language itself.

Ibibio is written in a Latin-based orthography, developed through missionary and, later, Nigerian linguistic scholarship, using standard Latin letters supplemented by digraphs to represent sounds not found in English. Tone, which is phonemically significant, is generally not marked in everyday writing. Nsibidi, historically used across the wider Cross River region including by Ibibio and Efik secret societies such as Ekpe/Ekpo, is an ideographic and pictographic system of symbols conveying meaning directly rather than representing the sounds of spoken Ibibio, so it is not an alphabet or syllabary for the language in the way the Latin orthography is.