Alabo7978:

There's a researcher who claimed to have linked close to a thousand of our words to the medu neter of kemet(Egypt)

I've noticed this in some Ijaw words too! I've been desperately searching for articles on this! Would love to connect!

I'll probably make a seperate thread on this, but why not just classify Ibani as a fluid identity? Ethnicity is a social construct and we identify as Ijaw. At the same time, we shouldn't ignore that our culture is mixed with Igbo. Our.ancestors practiced acculturation, but the Igbo language, genetics, and influence was never lost. This created a blended, creolized culture thats beautiful and should be celebrated in its entirety.

Similar to how douglas in the Caribbean are mixed Black and South Asian, but are still considered a type of Black, I think that's also how we can view Ibani Ijaws.

Hey, I've been trying to curate a playlist of Ijaw/Izon artists who make contemporary/pop music and sing in Ijaw while doing it.

I've been having trouble because I keep getting directed to old school-ish Awigiri music when I try to look. Would appreciate some suggestions!

I actually like facial scars and hope the tradition continues. It's not much different from tattoos and other types of body modifications.

What's wrong is that it's done to children. It should be consensual and for adults only. Similar to the Maui in New Zealand.

[please delete]

Greetings NL!
I'm trying to learn Ijaw by the end of the summer. I have Ijaw-English dictionaries, but it's still difficult to learn without access to the same resources available when I was learning Igbo. For example, there is only one video online of someone demonstrating how to pronounce the letters in the Izọn alphabet. It's concerning, but we move.

I learn languages fast, because studying the root words makes it so much easier. Just like most Niger-Congo languages, Izọn's root words are focused on universal aspects found in our traditional belief systems and deities (heavy emphasis on things of nature). I've been searching for a root word list for Izọn with associated categories they tend to cover, but have not been successful. Does anyone know where I can find this, or else be willing to write one out for me? Thank you in advance!

Here's an example of how this might look:

A. Root word: Suo/To ( 'dtzo' )
1. Suo/So =Izon sky deity, holds light + water, holds Woyingi up as she sits above Suo in the heavens
2. Word + concept associations: sky, heaven, up, raise, lift, tall, God, clean, holy, natural, fate, destiny, near, follow, entering, good fortune, brightness or clearness, face, eyes. associated with telling time (looking at the sky. etc.), judgement and decision.
3. Examples
i) Sotoru = atmosphere ( sky + eyes);
ii) Sotonte = it has been decided (sky + eyes again).

B. Root word: Gba/Ba/Kpa
1. Bara/Tara = Izon earth deity and hands of Woyingi, helped her create humans out of mud.
Alagba is the god of thunder; associated with Bara and Suo. Lower in the pantheon but also where many roots stem.
2. Word + concept associations: Anying dealing with the hands or arms, anything dealing with "earth", thunder/loud sounds, pottery, etc. Anything dealing with conflict, violence, strength, a "way" of doing things, etc.
3. Examples:
i) Bara = hands (that's what Woyingi used to create humans out of mud. Hands = moulding from earth),
ii) Bara nama = gorilla (bara = strong; nama =animal),
iii) Compound: Barasuo = help; assist (Bara = the way to do something + suo = divine guidance in doing so)

I assume you mean Southeast Africa, since the Kenya/Tanzania region is different from the Horn. They're pretty different by virtue of being on opposite sides of the continent. The similarities are what's most interesting to me. But to answer your question:

1. West African languages are tonal, but most East African languages lost their tones. We share some of the same words, but the loss of tone is still there (E.g. Nyingi = mother in both Kalabari Ijaw and Swahili).
2. I find East Africans more laid back, while us West Africans are bolder (Nigerians and Cameroonians being the craziest)
3. All anglophone and hispanophone West Africans speak the same mutually intelligible Pidgin, but East Africans don't have a Pidgin of their own
4. West African athletes excel at power sprints. East African athletes excel at long distance running.
5. I feel East Africans are generally more politically conscious than West Africans, so more resistant to Western imperialism
6. West Africa has 9 French-speaking countries, East Africa doesn't have any
7. West African music is a lot more diverse and developed in my opinion
8. East Africa has better nature preserves. It's beautiful.
9. West Africans and East Africans practice Islam and Christianity, but I think West Africans practice their traditional spiritualities more—and those spiritualities have strong representation in the diaspora.
10. East African food is heavily derivative of South Asian food to me. West African food is more original and diverse to me.
11. Southern East Africans, particularly Kenyans, are a lot more liberal to me than West Africans.

Another Internet Anthropologist Thread lol - Here's an interesting one for my historians:

Equatorial Guinea (EG) is one of my favorite countries, particularly because I speak Spanish and they sound like Spanish Nigerians (especially the guineanos on Bioko Island).

While I know Nigerians have been migrating to Bioko for a while, I have always felt the Bubi language sounded similar to both Igbo and Ijaw. The fact that there's a subgroup of Bóbë who call themselves "Baney" really piqued my interest. I wondered if they could be related to the Ibani? They're even located on the North side of Bioko closest to Bonny, Nigeria. The spelling definitely isn't indigenous or Spanish and looks like a corruption of Bonny—done so that it's pronounced the same way in Spanish. I was curious.

Language: As usual, I did some digging. The only free Bubi-English dictionary I could find was a very limited one published in 1881 by an Igbo/English man (William Barleycorn). The other is just an online Bubi-Spanish wordlist. I found some similarities with Ijaw and Igbo, but not too many. Bubi does have noun classes though. Perhaps, like Swahili, noun classes change the word to an unrecognizable form? Overall, it wasn't too convincing:

Kalabari: bebo = people / Bubi: bobe = people
Kalabari: inei = mine / Bubi: 'Ne = mine
Kalabari: inye / Bubi: inye = me or you
Igbo: ke? = How?/ Bubi: ke? = How?
Igbo: ncha = white / Bubi: nchwa = white ant
Igbo: rie = eat / Bubi: ri = eat
Kalabari: nyingi = mother/ Igbo= nne/ Bubi: ñye
Kalabari: obori = goat / Bubi: mbori = goat

Genealogy: I then looked into genealogy. I already knew my mtDNA haplogroup is most common in Southeast Africa. I also noticed there was a significant portion on the coast of Angola. (I deduced that my Ijaw ancestors probably migrated there from the Great Lakes area about 400+ years ago). I found my unique haplogroup among a few of the people in a research study of the Bóbë on Bioko. Interestingly, researchers placed their origins in Angola, which is where I deduced my Ijaw ancestors settled for a short time before moving to the Niger Delta. This was a strange placement considering Cameroon, Nigeria, and Gabon are closer to Bioko. My guess is that they went by relative frequency of the haplogroup in their dataset at the time?

Oral history: As a disclaimer, I got this from LipstickAlley from someone who claims to be Bubi. It may or may not be accurate:

"The ethnic oral history states that the Bubi descend from intertribal slavery, coming from several ethnic groups that existed along the African coast thousands of years ago.

Intertribal slavery of that time allowed the conquered tribe to exist freely, in their own villages and with their own families intact, minus their rulers and their families who were often killed...I've read that the Bubi population once numbered in the millions (3-6 million) - living in total geographic isolation until the Portuguese arrived. They fought off European penetration until around the beginning of the 1800s.

I've been told that one of the former enslaving tribes that the Bubi ancestors escaped from was the Igbo [sounds like the Ijaws] Note: the Igbo were targeted in the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade by the Portuguese and other neighboring ethnic groups (Brass Island, Igbo Landing), then later targeted other groups and engaged in TAST profiteering [yeah, definitely Ijaws lol]...European colonization made the Bubi vulnerable to the tribes their ancestors escaped from. I believe that the history of the intertribal slave origin of Bubi people had been well-known among other west-central African tribes."

"According to legend when another tribe, more warring and more numerous, invaded the Bubi's beach homeland, forcing them into hard labor and slavery. They must have stared with longing across the water at those peaceful, mysterious peaks nearly 100 miles away that began to hold the promise of peace and freedom. The chiefs of the sub-tribes decided that they needed to flee the country and cross the seas to a new land named Fernando Po, which is now Bioko Island...The Bubi, as shore-dwelling, fishing people, probably had [more]canoe-engineering knowledge than most African people. But when a plan for escape began to develop, they knew it would take the largest trees of the mainland forest to make the strongest canoes for their bold, desperate plan -- which was to leave, not all at once, but by sub-tribes, under cover of darkness over a period of several months, and flee to that distant land."

This is pretty interesting. The tribe she describes definitely sounds Ijaw (people usually assume it's Igbos—we intermix after all). I don't know any other tribes that engaged in slavery in that region besides Aros, but they were in the hinterlands and supplied Ijaws with enslaved people for resale. There's strong indication that Ijaws weren't the original inhabitants of the Niger Delta in the Holocene period. I think Ijaws definitely would have been war-like enough to conquer a peaceful people like the Bóbë when we came to the Niger Delta. We also had the canoeing and fishing knowledge to survive the conditions there. Perhaps the Bóbë were the original inhabitants?!

Overall, there's not enough info for any of this to be convincing, but it was an interesting thought. I definitely need to visit Equatorial Guinea one of these days!

Below: Baney (Bube) chief wearing a similar Ijaw hat.

ChinenyeN:
Nice topic. I guess now would be as good a time as any for me to share some things.

I want to start with that language family tree in the first post. There is only one point I want to drive home. Language family trees do not encode any temporal information. So when you look at these language family trees, it's not actually saying anything about time. It's all about genetic relationship, a.k.a. language features.

Let me make a comparison with the human family tree. The human family tree shows genetic descent of people, but it also encodes a sense of time. We know for instance that a father and a mother are older than the descendent children. We know that grand parents are even considerably older than the descendent children. Ultimately, we understand that the further up you go in a human family tree, the further back in time you are. Language family trees have the exact same concept as human family trees, minus the concept of time. So, going all the way up to Dogon does not actually mean that Dogon is the oldest branch. A different tool (glottochronology) is used by linguists to get a sense of time for when languages diverge. In the case of Dogon, even though it is high up in the language family tree, it actually has a time of 4000 BP (Before Present), making it as young as Bantu. While Mande, which is lower down the tree than Dogon actually has a time of 6000 BP, making the Mande group of languages considerably older than the Dogon group of languages.

Long story short, the language family trees are only used to show relatedness or divergence with no sense of time or scale. So, in the case of Ijo, how do we interpret this tree? Basically, as such:

Ijo language belongs to a yet unknown branch (call it proto-Ijoid) that originally diverged with similar features as Dogon and to a lesser extent Mande. Do we have an idea of when proto-Ijoid diverged? No. However, linguists do have some theories about modern Ijo that might shed some light on proto-Ijoid, and this is where it gets interesting for Ijo.

The surviving Ijoid branch has a dating of 3000 BP. That is young. From a linguistic perspective, 3000 BP suggests that the surviving Ijoid lects, diffused into the Delta rather recently. Now, typically, I will always state that we can separate the movement of language from the movement of people. However, Ijo is a rather special case. Ijo has some language innovations that are simply shocking, compared to the rest of the Niger-Congo group. These innovations, plus the fact that Ijo lexicon fully reconstruct fishery terminology, suggests that the branch which Ijoid belongs to has been isolated from the rest of the typically agrarian Niger-Congo family for a very long time. Maybe, in fact, for reasons unknown to us, it's been isolated since its inception. This makes modern Ijo rather special in the sense that we can maybe guarantee that the movement of the language equates to the movement of the people. In other words, Ijo people entered the Delta rather recently. It might be interesting to re-examine Ijo oral traditions with this linguistic understanding. Tangent, but related. I think our oral traditions borrow from each other or come from some source that predates us. When there's a gap in an Ijaw story, I look to Edo, etc., and it fills the gap. Also, most of the Niger-Congo root words are mutations of each other and describe the same class of things. Guess I'll have to make another post about it but they all deal with aspects of our religion/deities. I stay clear of egyptology for many reasons, but I can't ignore some of the obvious derivations from medu neters (particularly Shu and Geb).

But what does this say about proto-Ijoid? The linguistic analysis suggests that proto-Ijoid was isolated elsewhere and not within the Niger Delta. One linguist, Roger Blench, believes there is a possibility that proto-Ijoid resided further east. How far east is uncertain. I suspect Blench may not have been thinking of Sudan, but since Blench did not explain any further than "east of the Delta", we cannot know for sure. Perhaps he did. I wonder where in that Great Lakes region would they be isolated? Though there's similarities in all N-C words (esp words of nature and numbers), I can't quite shake the Swahili word for mother being the exact same in Ijaw (Nyingi). If all else fails, we'll assume the Ijaw are from Wakanda.

I say, if we can eventually identify a confluence for proto-Niger-Congo, then we can probably suggest that the Ijoid branch got isolated somewhere near there.

Anyhow, I see there are two specific questions in the original post. I can really only provide an supposition to question #1. In short, the proto-Niger-Congo has an estimated date of 10,000 BP. The Ijoid branch was isolated for such a long time and was able to successfully remain isolated for perhaps seven of those 10,000 years. If we take this isolation along with the highly acquatic lexicon, we can see that the proto-Ijoid branch likely did not compete for resources with their agrarian counterparts. So it's possible that proto-Ijoid had limited contact with other Niger-Congo branches until it entered the Delta. That would explain how the language could have been preserved the way it was.

First, thank you so much for correcting me on the proper way to read a language tree. Good to know!

Second, this was amazing and insightful! I actually saw this reply last week and did some research...there's strong indication that Ijọs might have migrated from the African Great Lakes area in East Africa no more than 2-300ish years ago!

Would be nice if an official population study could be done (esp genealogical). I wrote about this elsewhere, so I'll just copy and paste it here. I'd appreciate your thoughts and criticisms:


Memorable Title Or Something
There's strong indications that Ijaws have only lived in Nigeria for 2-300 years (all of us). It appears our ancestors might have settled along the shores of the African Great Lakes area for ~2000 years before that. This is consistent with our ancestors' aquatic, voyaging lifestyle since the area is filled with waterways. If this is true, that means our true "ancestral homeland" (for the Holocene period) is in SouthEast Africa and that we have only been "West African" for a couple hundred years!

Overview of African migration
Technically, we all originated in East Africa. It's where the oldest human remains were found. There were several migrations out, in and all within the continent for thousands of years. Earlier L3e mtDNA haplogroups expanded through Sudanic and Chadic regions, and then settled in present day Cameroon/Nigeria ~2001-36,000 years ago. This period is called the Pleistocene period. Then, starting ~2000 years ago during the Bantu Migration, the L3e haplogroup expanded again into many areas in and out of Africa, especially Southern and Eastern Africa. That's how the L3e2a1b1 haplogroup likely found itself in the Great Lakes region. The period starting 2000 years ago to present day is called the Holocene period. This is the period I'm referring to when I say we likely came from East Africa.

Findings
I think most knowledgeable Nigerians suspected this, but it's likely that Ijaw languages (Ijaw) developed in isolation from other Nigerian languages, only coming recently—hence its unique structural and lexical differences compared to other Nigerian language (e.g. SOV structure instead of SVO). But if so, where did Ijaw people come from? And how long ago?


I took a 23andMe DNA test as a joke, but also out of curiosity a few months ago. I was shocked to find that I had an ancestor born between 1720-1810 who was 100% Southeast African. This shocked me because historically speaking, that's very recent!

This came from my maternal haplogroup: L3e2a1b1, which—to my surprise—is most common in Central and Southern East Africa, not West Africa. L3e2a1b1 is also common in Brazilians whose ancestors were sold through Angola, and a minority of Angolan coastal people. I then searched for people with the same haplogroup. Besides Nigerians and Diasporans, I found 1 from Zambia, 2 from Algeria and 1 from an unspecified Middle East/North African (MENA) country.



As I searched for more people with this haplogroup, I discovered this blog post from "The Water Diviner" who stated she has this maternal haplogroup. With this information, I was able to connect the dots! Everything she said tracks...except the part about running out of West Africans, so going to East Africa for slaves. Trans-Atlantic slave trade stayed within the Gulf of Guinea and did not specifically target East Africans.

It's ahistorical, but perfectly understandable why she'd come to that conclusion. Why? Well, if your last ancestor in Africa is East African, but the TA Slave Trade occurred on the west side of the continent, how else would you explain that? Her ancestor was likely part of the same group of Ijọs who migrated westward as mine!


The observations on her blog were eerily spot on. Her thoughts that her ancestors had a water affinity/stayed in areas "flush with water" describes Ijaws to a tee! The Ijaws' entire culture is water-based and we're known for traveling far distances by canoe. It makes sense to settle here. Also, like @ChinenyeN pointed out, the highly aquatic lexicon makes the language unique. Perhaps this is where our ancestors became highly adept at canoeing, fishing, etc.

This is further supported by the fact that one of the estimated closest language families to Ijaw (Katla-Rashad) is in the South Kordofan area of Sudan That's up the Nile from Lake Victoria, not too far away. It's also not too far from the "area between Sudan and Uganda" where her ancestors briefly settled before moving southbound on the Nile. Perhaps the present-day Katla-Rashadians are descendants of our ancestors who stayed there.



Limitations:
Middle East/North Africans: The only explanation I could think of for the MENAs with L3e2a1b1 is that they might be descended from Ijọ who came to the Niger Delta first, then traveled north 2-300 years ago. We do have an established history of traveling up and down the rivers. The Niger and Benue rivers were probably good waterways to the north. In addition to this, the locations of the languages most related to Ijoid in West Africa—Mande and Dogon—are literally along the path of the Niger River. In any case, the Zambian in the database gives some credence to the theory.




Migration over time: I don't remember where I read this, but some linguists have doubted that Ijọs expanded slowly to Nigeria from the Great Lakes over hundreds of years (in which case my ancestor would be one of the last), because countries in-between would be speaking languages close to Ijoid. The isolated nature of our language suggests that it happened over a short period of time. How short (few months, years)? I'm not sure.

L3e2a1b1 Migration : Some African Diasporans have this haplogroup, but would not have been in the same Ijọ group that migrated to the Niger Delta based on their closest ancestor's estimated birth year. I believe The Water Diviner mentioned a year in the 1700s that was well within my ancestor's estimated birth year. Her blog also mentions that her last ancestor within Africa was in Mozambique (lower part of Great Lakes). Knowing the Transatlantic slave trade occurred between 1600-1800s, it's safe to assume her ancestor's birthdate is within range.

Conclusion
There's strong indication that Ijaws have only been "native" to Nigeria (and West Africa) for 2-300 years. A combination of linguistic analysis, genealogy, historical analysis, archaeology, oral and written history, and what we know of Ijaw culture and behavior give strong support to this theory. It's likely that Ijaw people migrated to the Niger Delta in the 17-1800s from the Great Lakes area of East Africa—our ancestral home for ~2000 years!

Given how old Ijoid languages seem to be, it'd be beneficial if a genealogy study was conducted on the
Ijaw population. Other populations of interest are coastal Angolans and Bobe (Bubi)/inhabitants of Bioko. A decent number of people from these populations had this haplogroup. Perhaps Ijaw ancestors might have stopped in Angola and came up to the Niger Delta by canoeing along the Gulf of Guinea coast (the specific Bioko inhabitants might have come from Angola)?

Additional Thoughts
I don't know who "The Water Diviner" is. Unfortunately, I couldn't find her name, but I think she's African American. If this ends up being true, then it is eerily astonishing how on point she is about our people's affinity to water....it's as if she knows herself without knowing that she knows herself.

Anywho, I welcome all thoughts and critiques!

Ijoh:
Ijaw is the oldest tribe in Nigeria and one of the oldest tribes in Africa.


Ijaw have always occupied the coasts of West Africa for thousands of years.

The Kru people of Liberia are our close relations. Didier Drogba is Ijaw from Ivory Coast Kru

Kru are Ijaws.

I wouldn't say that. They're definitely an older group than most other N-C groups, but Ijaw is far older than Kru linguistically. There's about 7 other language families that break off from the Proto-NC language tree in between Ijoid and Kru. It's more distant.

Dogon and Mande (Mali), Katlaic and Rashadic (Sudan) remain our closest known language families.

Also, Drogba actually belongs to a Mande ethnic group, not Kru!

BlackSaints:
Okrika people are not from Sudan.

We're "from" the Niger Delta. But linguistic studies point to origins in the southern area of Sudan. I want to know why that is. Ijaw is a uniquely isolated language. For it to share relationships with languages in Mali and Sudan, and not its neighboring languages means it broke off from the original Proto-NC language early and we've somehow managed to preserved it all these years.

Also, it was my mom's Okirika mtDNA that placed my 6th great-grandparent in East Africa lol.

I'm Ijaw (Ijọ, Kalabari-Ibani/Okirika) and Igbo. I made an account because I found some interesting things when researching our languages and I wanted to get some insight from knowledgeable Ijaw people about this and our history:

A) ​Ijaw is the oldest Niger-Congo language in Nigeria and likely the second oldest of all the Niger-Congo languages. This has been confirmed by decades of linguistic studies (see diagram by Roger Blench attached). The Ijaw language's closest relatives in West Africa are the Dogon and Mande languages in Mali!

I can confirm, while listening to videos of 350 different Niger-Congo languages, Dogon and Jula (Mande) were the most familiar/similar to Kalabari Ijaw to me. This was before I knew they were relatives, so there's no confirmation bias here!

B) Even more interesting: Ijaw shares a relationship with Kordofanian languages in SUDAN—more specifically, Katla-Rashad (See map attached)! The people who speak these languages are relatively isolated in the mountains and hills of Nuba. There are a lot of similar word cognates to Kalabari Ijaw.

C) I took a DNA test a couple months ago and it actually revealed some distant ancestry from Southern East Africa. According to the test, I have an ancestor that was born between 1720-1810 who had 100% Southern East African ancestry. This is relatively recent for westward African human migration. That's only 200-300 years ago.

This is very intriguing and I want to learn more. Can anyone, Ijaw or otherwise, offer some insight into this?

1. How were our ancestors able to preserve the Ijaw language for THIS long when we frequently traded, traveled by canoe, and interacted with so many different people?

2. Have you heard of our people coming from Sudan or anywhere in East Africa? Ijaws kept detailed records of our history. If it was happening as recently as 2-300 years ago, there should be accounts of that, right?