How Igbo became Ibo and why it persists

Why do some people still write Ibo instead of Igbo? I have seen Ibo in books, newspapers, official documents and social media posts, sometimes even written by Igbo people themselves. Some insist that Ibo is the English spelling while Igbo is the indigenous spelling. Others say Ibo is for the people while Igbo is the language. Yet some other people simply use the spelling they have known since childhood.

But how did we end up with two spellings in the first place? We can trace the origin to the nineteenth century, when European missionaries began developing written forms of several African languages. The problem was that some African sounds had no direct equivalents in the English alphabet. For example, Igbo contains sounds that are unfamiliar to many English speakers. The challenge was how these sounds could be represented in books so that readers would know how to pronounce them.

In 1855, a German scholar named Karl Richard Lepsius came up with what looked like a solution. He designed an alphabet for sounds that European alphabets had no letters for. Lepsius, who was born in 1810, was an Egyptologist and linguist famous for his studies of ancient Egyptian civilisation. He used Roman letters but added special marks to some of them to represent sounds that were absent from European languages.

Then in 1857, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a missionary and linguist, used the Lepsius orthography in his publication of the Isoama-Ibo Primer, prepared with the assistance of Simon Jonas, an Igbo-speaking interpreter who helped him study the language and translate biblical passages. Crowther was a Yoruba man who had been rescued from slavery and later became the first African Anglican bishop. He also worked extensively on writing and translating African languages.

The Anglican Church Missionary Society continued using this spelling system in its religious and educational materials. In 1913, the society completed the Igbo Union Bible under the leadership of Thomas John Dennis and his collaborators. The Bible was intended to provide a common written language for Igbo-speaking communities with different dialects. It was used in Anglican churches for decades.

In the older spelling system, the sound we now represent with the two letters gb could be written using a modified letter bo. This special b had a small forward-pointing mark (“>”) underneath it, distinguishing it from the ordinary b. That tiny mark was not an ornament. It told the reader that the letter represented a different sound.

Take two common Igbo words: mgbe, meaning when, and mbe, meaning tortoise. In the older Bible spelling, mgbe could be written as mbe, with the special mark underneath the b. The word for tortoise remained mbe, without that mark. In print, the two words looked almost alike but have different pronunciations and meanings.

The name Igbo was also written as Ibo with the forward arrow symbol under the b. But when this spelling appeared in publications that could not reproduce the special character, the mark was often omitted. Many printers and typesetters, especially those working primarily in English, did not have the necessary type or found it inconvenient to use. Once the mark disappeared, Ibo became Ibo on the printed page.

We should not assume that every historical use of Ibo resulted from a printer dropping the mark. European writers had also become accustomed to spelling African names in particular ways. But the difficulty of reproducing special characters was one reason the distinction could be lost. If you had never seen the original spelling, you would naturally think Ibo was correct.

The more Ibo appeared in books, newspapers, maps and official documents; the more people accepted it as correct. A child who grew up seeing Ibo in schoolbooks would naturally regard it as the proper spelling. A foreign researcher consulting colonial records would encounter the same spelling. Other writers copied it, and it spread.

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Even Chinua Achebe used Ibo in Things Fall Apart, his 1958 debut novel, which has become the most-read African literary work. He was Igbo himself, writing about his own people, but Ibo was already the usual spelling in English-language publications, where it was not easy to insert the forward arrow under the b. Millions of people around the world read Things Fall Apart and encountered the spelling Ibo. Even to this day, that wrong spelling of Igbo as Ibo remains in all the new editions of Things Fall Apart that are printed and sold globally.

In 1961, a committee chaired by S. E. Onwu recommended a new official Igbo orthography, which began to be implemented in schools in 1962. The new system established a common standard, including the use of gb to represent the sound previously written with the modified b. The name of the people and their language was now officially written Igbo, without the need for a special mark underneath another letter.

Achebe’s Arrow of God was published in 1964, after the new orthography had been adopted. It used Igbo instead of Ibo. But the publication of new books could not immediately erase decades of established usage. Older books remained in circulation, and English-language publishers continued following familiar conventions. So, even after Igbo became the standard spelling, many people continued writing Ibo.

Yoruba has a similar problem with the letter . The Yoruba alphabet contains both s and s, with the second representing a sound similar to the English sh. That is why names such as Sóyínká and Sadé contain a sound that English speakers would ordinarily represent with the letters sh.

Unfortunately, the dot underneath S is frequently omitted in newspapers, websites and official records. That is why we usually see Soyinka and Sade instead of their properly marked forms. People unfamiliar with Yoruba may then pronounce the names with the ordinary English s rather than the sh sound. Growing up in the South-East, I made that mistake for years before I learnt that the s in Yoruba names like Wole Soyinka, Sade Adu, Tai Solarin and Zulu Sofola should be sounded as sh.

Hausa also has a spelling convention that may confuse English speakers. In standard Hausa spelling, the letter c represents the sound written ch in English. Therefore, abinci, meaning food, is pronounced approximately abinchi. Someone who does not understand the Hausa pronunciation format may see the word “abinci” in a book and pronounce it wrongly as “abinsi” or “abinki.” But nothing is missing from the Hausa spelling; that is simply how the language represents the sound.

The question we should then ask is: Who should decide how African names are written? European missionaries helped put several African languages into writing and produced dictionaries, textbooks and Bible translations. However, they sometimes had to make decisions about how unfamiliar sounds should be represented. Their choices were influenced by the alphabets they knew and the printing equipment they had.

There is an African proverb that says until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. The proverb fits what happened to many African names. Outsiders wrote them down in spelling systems that missed some of their sounds, and many of those spellings are still in use today. For example, Ọka became Awka, Enugwu was turned to Enugu, Ahaba was anglicised as Asaba, Zazzau or Zariya became Zaria, Sakkwato is now Sokoto.

That is how Ibo became familiar to generations of readers. But the official spelling has been Igbo since 1961. Now that we know where the confusion came from, shouldn’t we make an effort to use the correct spelling?