Agbirigba is a
cant
Cant, CANT, canting, or canted may refer to:
Language
* Cant (language), a secret language
* Beurla Reagaird, a language of the Scottish Highland Travellers
* Scottish Cant, a language of the Scottish Lowland Travellers
* Shelta or the Cant, a la ...
(or
argot
A cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group.McArthur, T. (ed.) ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (1992) Oxford University Press It may also be called a cryptolect, argo ...
) based on the Ogbakiri dialect of the Nigerian language
Ikwerre of
Port Harcourt. There are about thirty speakers, from a persecuted section of the community.
Agbirigba is unintelligible to other speakers of Ikwerre, but the rule for its derivation is simple: the consonant ''t'' is added before every CV syllable (or, more accurately, every CV
mora). Some speakers add an
epenthetic
In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epent ...
vowel to break up the resulting consonant cluster.
Derivation
The addition of the ''t'' results in
consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s that do not occur in Ikwerre or other local languages. Some speakers pronounce Agbirigba with the resulting clusters. For speakers to break them up with vowels, the vowels are all
high
High may refer to:
Science and technology
* Height
* High (atmospheric), a high-pressure area
* High (computability), a quality of a Turing degree, in computability theory
* High (tectonics), in geology an area where relative tectonic uplift t ...
(one of the four vowels ), and match the subsequent vowel in
ATR,
backness,
nasality and
tone.
An NCV sequence becomes NtCV. For example, ''m̀fù'' 'horn' becomes ''ǹtfù'' or ''ǹtùfù''.
There are some complications to this: if the following vowel is /a/, with no ATR quality for the epenthetic vowel to match, then the epenthetic vowel will be /i/ or /u/ depending on, apparently, whether the following consonant is coronal or velar, and if the tone of the following syllable (whether CV or CVV) is complex (rising or falling), then the first element of that tone will move to the epenthetic vowel.
;Examples
*''ńkétʃí vò ré ídʒí'' "Nkechi bought a yam"
becomes:
*''ńtkéttʃí tvò tré ítdʒí''
or
*''ńtíkétítʃí tùvò tíré ítídʒí''
Here all the vowels are ATR, so the epenthetic vowels are /i/ or /u/ depending on whether the following vowel is front (/e/ or /i/) or back (/o/ or /u/). There is no t before the word-initial syllabic nasal in ''Nkechi'' or word-initial vowel in ''iji'', as neither is a CV syllable.
*''ŋ́gɔ́zɪ́ wṹ lêm'' "Ngozi died"
becomes:
*''ńtgɔ́tzɪ́ twṹ tlêm''
or
*''ńtʊ́gɔ́tɪ́zɪ́ tṹwṹ tílèm''
Here we have some RTR and nasal vowels. With the high–low tone on ''lêm'', the high element shifts to the epenthetic vowel for ''tílèm''.
References
{{authority control
Cant languages
Languages of Nigeria
Language games