ABSTRACT
Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) has been described as ‘one of the world’s greatest novelists dead or alive.’ His novel Things Fall Apart (1958) has been named ‘one of 12 novels considered the Greatest Book Ever Written.’ But Achebe had other legacies he bequeathed to African literature. One of the most enduring and controversial of those was his strong and defiant position on the issue of the standardization of written Igbo language. This sparked off a flurry of loud negative reactions by some Igbo linguistics scholars which raged for decades and did untold harm to the growth of Igbo Language Studies in general, and Igbo literature in particular. This chapter discusses with detailed analysis, the origins and substance of the controversies in which the Igbo Oral-Written interface was engulfed, and proffers possible solutions.
