Blossom speaking Igbo

This video was recorded in Stockholm, Sweden by Kristen Tcherneshoff and Daniel Bögre Udell. Igbo, the primary language spoken by the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria, is one of the major languages of Nigeria, along with Hausa and Yoruba. Ethnologue indicates that it is spoken by approximately 27,000,000 speakers in Nigeria and linguistic communities in locations including Brazil, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, and Ghana. Historically, Igbo was standardized in religious contexts, specifically by the Union Ibo Bible. Due to the Atlantic slave trade, the language was spread by enslaved Igbo speakers throughout the American colonies. Igbo has more than 20 dialects that vary in mutual intelligibility, the most widely used being Central Igbo, which developed from the dialects of the Ezinifite group in Eastern Nigeria. A tonal language, Igbo has high and low tones, and sometimes a third, downstepped high tone. Additionally, Igbo is an agglutinating language, primarily through its extensive use of suffixes. Since 1900, Igbo has used the Latin writing system. Since 1972, the Society Promoting Igbo Language and Culture (SPILC) works with a standardization committee to culturally promote Central Igbo, while making it more inclusive to speakers by using loanwords from other dialects. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.