Her Igbo Parents Didn’t Teach Her The Language. So Ijemma Onwuzulike Built Her Own Dictionary

Language is an integral part of a people’s culture. Beyond communication, it bears historical significance, which is why much effort is made to pass it down from generation to generation. If a language falls out of use because all its native speakers are dead, then that culture is getting closer to being wiped out. 

There are some discussions as to whether the Igbo language is in danger of extinction, advanced in part by a 2006 UNESCO report that predicted the Igbo language will become extinct within 50 years. There has been a decline in the population of monolingual elderly speakers, reduced competence and performance among Igbo speakers (especially children), and the deterioration of idioms, proverbs, and other rhetorical elements of the Igbo language.

In recent times, however, individuals and organisations have stepped up to see that the language is not only preserved, but presented in forms that are easily accessible.

For Ijemma Onwuzulike, a Nigerian software engineer who lives in California and works at a New York-based technology outfit called Squarespace, the journey in figuring out her cultural identity was a peculiar one. She didn’t learn Igbo while growing up, but in March 2021, she successfully launched Nkọwa okwu, the first Igbo-English online dictionary, which is built to encourage community contribution. In a Google Meet interview with Neusroom, she explained what it was like growing up, what got her so invested in language, and how she got around to designing the dictionary.

 “My father is from Imo State, and my mother from Enugu State. My parents had my two elder sisters in Nigeria, but by the time my mother was pregnant with me, the family had relocated to California in the United States.

“From a very young age, I took up interest in programming and video games. My parents saw this and encouraged me, even though they didn’t fully understand what programming was all about.”

Five minutes into the interview, Onwuzulike reveals that her parents didn’t communicate with her and her elder sisters in Igbo while growing up. According to her, “they only spoke English to us, never Igbo. Nowadays when we ask why they did that, they say it because they didn’t want to ‘confuse’ us while we learned English.”

When did the idea of creating a platform for learning the Igbo language spring up?

“I got into secondary school and found out that my elder sisters and I were not the only Igbo children who found it difficult to speak the language. There were other kids whose parents had also failed to teach them how to speak Igbo, so by 2016, I had told myself that I was going to fix this. I gained admission to study Computer Science at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and by 2018, I created a cute little app for my younger siblings to learn Igbo. The app contained multiple-choice questions, body parts, clothing types, and lessons concerning time. At the time, I also minored in Japanese Language and Literature – the school structure allows you to take a major and a minor – so I said to myself, ‘learning languages isn’t so difficult.’”

“I had planned to continue the project after graduating in 2019, but I quickly got a job in New York, so I didn’t have time. However, during the quarantine, I returned to California in April 2020 and started working on it. I started talking to my parents, but it was not until September 2020 that I put up the Igbo API. I laid out the technical foundations, worked on the back end, and after three months (December 2020) I opened up to a developer community, and shared the API on GitHub. I actually created a group chat on Slack, which fell through because there was no organisation, but at least it made me see that there was genuine interest.”

She continues, “in January 2021, I became more intentional about the process. I brought in Igbo linguists, data analysts, designers, translators and editors. I reached out on Twitter, and a lot of people responded, asking how they could partake: I was getting no less than five DMs each day. It was a great time, and it was beautiful to see how people’s interest would be captured. We wanted to make it open to everyone, and we wanted to encourage flexibility. We emphasised on making the process of onboarding as easy as possible.”

 “The idea is that your product is never done. You always have to adapt to the needs of people and make sure your product is of the highest quality. On the surface, it looks perfect, but as a software engineer, I can tell there’s always something to work on. Right now, it’s creating value that didn’t exist before. We are focusing on a central Igbo text, but we are also keeping track of dialects. We want to make sure the robustness is preserved. We want to have audio recordings; we have 8000 words and only 8 per cent of them are in audio recordings. We want a database of dialects, we want higher quality words, and we want those words to be linked to one another. The dictionary currently doesn’t have synonyms and antonyms, and we want to fix that.”

On the question of feedback and possible collaborations, Onwuzulike sounds pretty optimistic. She says, “my parents share it (the dictionary) and the reactions are positive. I was worried that conservative Igbos would be aggressive towards it, but it’s been generally positive.

“I look forward to collaborating with language institutions. The mentality is to keep it ‘purely Igbo.’ It would be cool if we keep it within ourselves. I want it to be owned by us. I’m thinking (of working with) academic institutions and professors, it would be nice to have a stamp of approval”, she adds.

Onwuzulike notes that as a way of compensating for their mistake in her childhood, her parents converse with her younger sisters – a set of triplets – in Igbo.

“Now we have triplets, and my parents speak Igbo to them”, she says. “If they want to be mischievous, they can talk about me and my elder sisters behind our backs. They know how to do that.”

Nkọwa Okwu is the latest in a series of efforts to preserve language and culture across the country. The Centre For Memories, co-founded by Nkiru Okparaeke, Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli and Nkem Nweke, was launched in 2017 to facilitate the teaching of Igbo history and tradition. With headquarters in Enugu, the Centre curates exhibitions, produces documentaries, organises monthly book readings and runs Nzuko Umuaka, a monthly interactive programme for children which features Igbo language classes, Igbo poetry, and traditional folktales. 

Maazi Ogbonnaya, a graduate of Igbo and Linguistics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), has also contributed to the promotion of the Igbo language. He has published 25 textbooks in Igbo, translated the BBC guidelines in Igbo before the launching of the BBC Igbo service, and assisted UNESCO in translating Igbo text. 

Even more complex is the innovative effort of Lotanna-Igwe Odunze, popularly known on Twitter as @sugabelly. In 2020, she published a book that teaches a new Igbo writing system she invented back in 2009. The new writing system is called Ndebe, and it merges ancient Igbo designs with modern practicality, thus creating a more functional writing system for modern-day Igbos. Ndebe, which Odunze describes as the “first truly usable, truly writeable, truly readable, and truly indigenous written form of Igbo”, is a modern and more practical revamp of the ancient system of graphic communication among Igbos known as Nsibidi, which was used to decorate the skin, calabashes, sculptures, and clothing items, as well as to communicate messages on houses.

Google has also built an Igbo-to-English translator as well as an English-to-Igbo translator, which works like a basic dictionary and is available on the Google Play store.

Meanwhile, Nigerian writer and linguist, Kola Tubosun, is leading the line in respect of promotion and international acceptance of the Yoruba language. In 2012, he led a successful campaign to include Yoruba in the list of languages on Twitter. In March 2015, he founded the “Yoruba names project” at Yorubaname.com as an attempt to document all Yoruba names in multimedia format. He has also worked as a consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary since 2018, and through his influence, a number of Nigerian English and Yoruba expressions were added to the Oxford Dictionary in December 2019.

On the need to preserve language, Ebuka Achonwa, a front-end developer who worked with Onwuzulike on Nkowa Okwu, feels that language is integral to a people’s identity.

“If we lose our language and culture, we have lost our roots”, says Achonwa, in an interview with Neusroom. “To preserve our roots and sense of identity, we need to do our best to ensure that we speak our languages and teach them, so that the younger generation will know and practise them. We need to hold on to what our fathers passed down to us.”

Language is complex, and it may be difficult to get people to pick up a new language in old age, but the existence of resource materials would definitely make it easier. In creating an online dictionary, there’s the chance that a cultural gap would be bridged.