Igbo

Igbo is spoken mainly in south-eastern Nigeria, across Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo states and parts of Delta and Rivers, and by large diaspora communities in Nigerian cities and abroad. It is one of the country's three major regional languages, used in radio and television broadcasting, taught as a subject in schools within Igbo-speaking states, and featured in Nollywood films and popular music. Igbo shows considerable dialect diversity — variants include Owerri, Onitsha, Umuahia, Nsukka and others — differences that were a major reason UNESCO and Igbo scholars have flagged concerns about declining transmission to children in some urban and diaspora settings, alongside a standard 'Central Igbo' form used in writing, education and media, based largely on the Owerri-Umuahia axis. Igbo is tonal, and its literature includes early influential works such as Pita Nwana's Omenuko and the Igbo-language writing of Chinua Achebe's contemporaries. It remains central to Igbo cultural and religious life, including in church services, traditional title-taking ceremonies and masquerade traditions, and efforts by cultural organisations and state governments aim to strengthen its use in schools and homes.

Igbo is written in a Latin-based orthography. The Ọnwụ orthography, adopted officially in 1961 after decades of rival systems (notably the earlier Lepsius-influenced and Africa Orthography variants), is the standard in use today. It represents vowel qualities absent in English using subdotted letters ị, ọ and ụ, and uses the digraph gb, gh, kp, nw, ny and others for sounds without single Latin letters. Tone, which is phonemic in Igbo, is not consistently marked in everyday writing, though linguistic texts use acute and grave accents. Nsibidi, an indigenous ideographic and pictographic sign system historically used across the Cross River region including by Igbo secret societies such as Ekpe, is a separate symbolic tradition rather than a script for writing spoken Igbo words.