wants everyone to write Igbo with freedom. The Latin alphabet, she says, has too many limitations and is a “deep source of frustration for everyone who has ever tried to read or write” Igbo. So she invented Ndebe, a script that pays homage to “the old Nsibidi logographs.”

Ndebe is not Nsibidi, she is quick to remind people. “It is completely unrelated,” she told this reporter during a 30-minute Zoom call in July. While the latter was invented more than 1,500 years ago and is generally considered too complex or indecipherable to be used by present-day Igbo people, Ndebe is designed to “overcome the design problems” of a writing system “every Igbo person could use simultaneously.”

The Ndebe script is visually striking. It consists of 1,174 characters, each of which represents a particular sound in Igbo. People necessarily don’t have to memorise all the characters to be able to read or write the script because there is a formula, a scientific logic – consciously embedded by Lotanna – to ease the difficulty of assimilation, especially for busy adults.

Ndebe solves two important problems of Igbo language literacy. One, it eliminates the confusion that often arises when two Igbo speakers with different dialects try to communicate via the written page. Two, it forces Igbo to be written with the appropriate tones.

Ndebe is “a writing system that addresses the tonal peculiarities of Nigerian languages, pleasing to the eye, which might carry the burden of our literary and academic aspirations,” linguist Kola Tubosun wrote recently.

Tubosun, whose work with Yoruba won him the Premio Ostana prize in 2016, also sees Ndebe, partly on the basis of its “visual allure”, being “used along with English or other language texts on signposts throughout the country.”

“ . . . where I think the script most succeeds is in its opening of a new vista for the revitalization of Igbo as a written language both on the page and on the web, for literacy, and for culture,” he wrote.



At some point, early this July, more than 300 people were tweeting about Ndebe. Lotanna had just unveiled the new script on a dedicated website. “This is brilliant,” one person tweeted. “This should be widely adopted.” Others praised Lotanna’s brilliance. “Oyinbos lied to Africans with Western education & we all believed without doing research,” another person wrote. “They said Africans only have oral history and no form of writing. Ethiopians have Geez script and South East Nigeria had Nsibidi which is 4000yrs old, thanks @sugabelly for educating us all.” The excitement was palpable.

An Ndebe Character. Photo Credit: The Ndebe Project
An Ndebe Character. Photo Credit: The Ndebe Project


When Lotanna started working on Ndebe in 2008, she was 19, studying Business Administration at Canisius College, a private Jesuit university in Buffalo, New York. The school had a lot of international students. “I used to hang out with a lot of Japanese students,” she said. Her Japanese communion piqued her interest in the East Asian nation’s culture, enough to begin considering learning Japanese.

Lotanna was a linguistic prodigy. As a child, she spoke Igbo and English, learned Yoruba in primary school, Hausa in secondary and taught herself Spanish. But it was Japanese, with its syllabic writing system, that crystallised her frustration with how African languages, especially her native Igbo, were written.

“Ever since I first learned to write Igbo in school, I have been infuriated with Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” she blogged in 2009. “The Roman system of writing was obviously never designed to accommodate African languages, but Mr. Crowther nevertheless proceeded to use it to write down all three major Nigerian languages, thereby bringing untold agony and exasperation on all future generations of young Nigerians.”

“For the Roman script, the tone marking is a big issue for me, especially because of Yoruba and the way we write,” Tubosun said during a phone interview. “There is also the technology, when we don’t have the tools to write it.” For example, Unicode is famous for incorrectly rendering certain Yoruba vowels. “So maybe if we have some other way of writing that can bypass the obstacles that Unicode presents. It might give us a new way of writing these languages.”

Lotanna started to research African writing systems and found out about Nsibidi which originated from the Cross river valley (south-east Nigeria) and consists of inscriptions in sanctuaries and special forms of language used among members of certain secret societies.

Precolonial sub-Saharan Africa is largely perceived, by western sources, as without a history of writing systems. But systems such as Nsibidi and Gicandi from the Kikuyu of Kenya, even if arcane, say otherwise. The Ge’ez script has also been in use in Ethiopia since 500 B.C. Since the 1800s, more African scripts – Mende in southern Sierra Leone, Loma in northern Liberia, Bamum in Cameroon – have been devised to perpetuate local lingua.

Armed with the knowledge that it was possible to create a writing system unique to Igbo, Lotanna, in 2008, started work.

At first, she planned to revive Nsibidi and supplement it with Ndebe. So, Igbo would be written in two scripts. (Japanese is notably written in three)

She completed the first iteration of Ndebe during the American winter break of 2008, bleeding into 2009 when she first wrote about the project on her blog. Then she was 20 and wanted to start an “Igbo Academy”.

“My goal is for the Igbo Academy to expand Igbo vastly by developing additions and modifications to the Igbo language that will greatly encourage its use in everyday life by Igbos and non-Igbos alike, and that will make Igbo relevant and expansive enough to be regularly used in business, politics, fashion, news, literature, dialogue, and in every other sphere of life,” she wrote at the time.

https://www.channelstv.com/2020/10/03/the-igbo-language-gets-its-own-modern-script-but-will-it-matter/?fbclid=IwAR00-mdSKIs7h2i3hxAQSs1jIUK7Z-grcX4IOH0_3kY6G3Xd1Ps4xM9Y-M4

Abeg this is hard

Great development. We need more of this in Africa.

Or are we just going to use colonial tools forever?

I no follow, from English to hard scrip

Nice one

Nice one.
This is just the upgraded version of Nsibidi. It won't take me time to learn it. Expect Anambra to implement it soonest

Osagyefo98:
Abeg this is hard

Sorry it is exclusively for Ndigbo, no offense

AdaugoChisom:
I no follow, from English to hard scrip

It is simple and more convenient

I love this.

OP, why would anyone starte a write-up the way you started this? If you want to copy and paste, why not do it a bit more mindfully? It wouldn't cost you anything to read and arrange what you're putting out for others to consume...

Bkayyy:
Sorry it is exclusively for Ndigbo, no offense

Next.
You have been noticed this night.

AdaugoChisom:
I no follow, from English to hard scrip

No be only u

let the younger generation Learn am.

Ndebe is a great script.

A very good way to start. The Igbo Latin Alphabet was developed by by our people. A new one that should be a modification of nsibidi or a new one capturing sound/ tonal variations must be developed to save Igbo language.

Osagyefo98:


Next.

You have been noticed this night.

learn it, it might be interesting to u

We need to infuse this into our educational system.

If the terrorists can add Arabic, we must add ours.

Beautiful, I'd love to learn this.

Made some research, there's an official site for this writing for those who want to learn

[url]ndebe.org[/url]

Izugbe Igbo or anambra dialet

I pRefer Our Ancient Writing Script " The Nsibidi"

THE Igbo Language?

Is there such a thing?

aribisala0:
THE Igbo Language?

Is there such a thing?

In Nigeria.

This is great and should be adopted by Ndigbo...


Nsibidi is not wholly Ndigbo but ndebe is, and it can even be used in writings.

I pRefer Our Ancient Writing Script " The Nsibidi"

Nsibidi is not wholly Ndigbo and it's mainly pictorial but ndebe can be used as both alphabet and numbers

Abeg, make dem no come teach us English again oh!

WoundedLamb:
OP, why would anyone starte a write-up the way you started this? If you want to copy and paste, why not do it a bit more mindfully? It wouldn't cost you anything to read and arrange what you're putting out for others to consume...

Korea did least than 100 years ago

So what's your point

Oh wow, na dis one be di solution to all di wahala for di world. Igbo language don finally arrive.

Wow, because that's exactly what the world needed right now.

I pRefer Our Ancient Writing Script " The Nsibidi"

The quoted is aka Agụ which is recent and was developed by my friend chiadokobi

mrvitalis:

Korea did least than 100 years ago

So what's your point

No mind them...

The Roman letter Ibo una never learn am finish. BTW, Nsibidu is Efik, not Ibo heritage.