ABSTRACT
Despite the popularity of the pioneer Igbo authors and the work of the early missionaries in designing the Igbo alphabet to facilitate written Igbo literature, the growth and development of Igbo literature suffered severe setbacks for decades because of the controversies over orthography for the standardization of written Igbo. The controversies began as far back as when some early missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century studied one of the many dialects of Igbo language and met audiences elsewhere that spoke widely different dialects. The disruptive controversies spanned decades beyond the mid-twentieth century. This chapter examines the efforts by linguists (themselves often divided) to establish a standard for written Igbo which they expected aspiring writers to learn and produce literature in. Africa’s twentieth-century leading novelist, Chinua Achebe, widened the scope and intensity of the controversies when he urged aspiring Igbo writers to ignore the rigid dictates of Igbo ‘linguistic purists,’ and instead create literature in their various dialects asserting: ‘Better by far to have lively prose and poetry in a multiplicity of dialects than have one dialect and no literature to speak of.’ The ramifications of the controversy generated by Chinua Achebe and the not-too-pleasant reactions by Igbo linguistic scholars, as well as their impacts on the growth of Igbo literature are comprehensively discussed and analyzed in this chapter. An earlier version of this chapter was published at the time to alert all concerned about the looming danger!
