ABSTRACT
The official Igbo orthography is sometimes referred to as the Onwu orthography after the medical doctor who was chairman of the government committee set up to resolve the orthographic question in 1961. The reversion to a discarded system might cause initial inconvenience and occasion some mistakes, but these would be more than compensated for by the enormous gain in the reduction of spelling mistakes. The geographical distribution of these distinctive features is immaterial; what matters to the analyst is the fact that such features are distinctive in Igbo and should, therefore, be represented in the orthography, as otherwise such an orthography would be incomplete. There is no upper limit to the number of symbols that an orthography should have; for that matter when devising an orthography for a multi-dialect speech community whose speakers include the ?ka Igbo of Bendel State, a large number of symbols may be necessary to do justice to all the dialects involved.
