ABSTRACT
εgbε:le, V.B.2 in thePolyglotta Africana, is a dialect of Etsakọ, 1 an Ẹdo language. Etsakọ is spoken in and near Afenmai Division in Mid-Western Nigeria by over 120,000 speakers, and Greenberg (1959) includes it, as Kukuruku, 2 in the Kwa sub-family of the Niger–Congo grouping. εgbε:le (Ẹkpẹri in the current orthography, and/ὲkphwὲlì/ in this author’s phonemic transcription) is the dialect of the Ẹkpẹri clan, who live mainly in some fourteen villages round the town of Ugbẹkpẹ. The 1963 Nigerian Census gave a population figure for the clan of 8,243, which seems rather conservative.
