Igbo is a Niger-Congo language with about 42 million speakers in central Nigeria. It's currently written in a Roman orthography called Ọnwụ, a 1961 consensus between the different spelling traditions of Protestant versus Roman Catholic missionaries. But Igbo spelling is not a settled issue at all. The Ọnwụ alphabet has two major flaws: the lack of technical support on typewriters, printers, and computers; and its lack of support for many sounds found in Igbo dialects. The first issue is being addressed by new technology, but the second issue is still very political.

The Ọnwụ orthography is associated with the promotion of a Standard Igbo dialect - Izugbe - based on the Owerri dialect, a Central dialect. But labialization, aspiration, and nasalization (discussed below) are distinctive in Owerri, and yet were omitted from Izugbe! Perhaps that's why the famous Igbo Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Chinua Achebe refused to write in it. In most languages, the standard dialect is the dialect of the unifying capital (English, French) or a great literary work (German, Italian); Standard Yoruba is based on the Oyo dialect. But Standard Igbo is not Central Igbo; it has been reduced to features common to most dialects, kind of a pidgin Igbo. One goal of Musa is to enable every Igbo to write his native language (dialect) in full, even if that isn't 100% intelligible to speakers of other dialects. And of course, Musa can write Standard Igbo, too.

The problems mentioned at the top of the page can be summarized in one complaint: the Roman alphabet doesn't have all the letters that Igbo needs - a very common problem among the languages that use it. But Musa does!

Unlike the Roman alphabet, Musa has all the letters needed for Igbo. There is no need for digraphs like ch gb gh kp ny or sh, and no need for diacritics like ị ọ ụ ṅ. And Musa has all the letters needed to write every dialect as it sounds.

Musa makes it easy to write tones, so there's no reason to leave them off. But more than being a tonal language, Igbo is a vowel-centric language (in contrast to consonant-centric Afroasiatic languages like Hausa, Amharic or Arabic). Igbo features vowel harmony within each word - the vowels i e o u don't occur in the same words as the vowels ị a ọ ụ:

Like every modern language, Igbo uses many foreign words, and because Musa can be used to write any language, these foreign words can be spelled in Musa, perhaps in a different font. For example, here is the name Nigeria written in both Igbo using the Njoya font and English using the Dushan font:

Musa offers some other advantages:

• Musa is featural: the graphical forms of the letters help to indicate the sounds. Vowels are short, while consonants are tall. Rounded vowels have round letters, sibilants and affricates have round bottoms, and so on: similar sounds have similar letters. This makes Musa easy to learn.
• Musa is universal: it can write almost all of the world's languages. It has almost 200 letters, and they always mean the same sound in every language. But Musa is written on a standard keyboard with only 26 keys.
• Musa is phonetic (we call it allophonic): we write what we say, not what we think we're saying. An example from Igbo: we write nasal vowels with a nasal suffix, even though the nasalization can be predicted from the sounds around them, because they sound different. The guiding principle is to write as if the reader doesn't know the phonological rules: we'd rather teach letters than rules.
• The Musa alphabet and keyboard can also write numbers, many arithmetic expressions, and formulas - there are no separate digits, and no ambiguity.
• Musa writes sentence intonation using punctuation, so we don't need underlining, different fonts, or emoji. This is important because scripts that don't write intonation encourage diglossia between the spoken and written languages, which we want to minimize. We want people to write what they're speaking: just sounds - not meanings, etymology (historical derivation), or morphology (grammatical derivation).
• Musa works fine in the digital world: Musa is Unicode-compatible, encoded in the Private Use Area (at E000-G2E3). There are numerous fonts, viewers for most browsers, and severeal keyboards from mechanical to virtual to remote.
• Most scripts are designed for native speakers of the language, who will mostly learn to read and write as children. Of course - that's as it should be! But every script also has other constituencies: adult speakers who are less literate than they would like to be (diaspora children, for example), speakers of non-standard dialects, people who are already literate in another language (Nigerian or foreign) who are learning both spoken and written Igbo at the same time, and people who don't need to read or write Igbo, but need to be able to recognize and pronounce Igbo names and phrases. This last category includes travelers of many kinds, administrators of governments, international organizations, or companies, and librarians and archivists. Musa was designed with all of them in mind, too.

  Disadvantages of Musa

• As of this writing, no language community currently uses Musa; only a few hobbyists use it, and it's relatively unknown. The Musa Academy is busy promoting it all over the world, but Igbo would be among the first to use it.
• It's not uncommon to encounter difficulties using Musa with software, and while there are usually workaround solutions, this problem won't go completely away until there is a substantial community of users. (But in fact Igbo has the same complaint now with the Roman alphabet and Unicode!)
• Musa has no historic or patrimonial connection with Igbo, Nigeria, or Africa - it is intended not to be an expression of national, religious, or political identity. It's an expression of the importance of education and literacy, the benefit of clear communication, and the value of bringing as many languages as we can into the future.

The idea of adopting a completely new script is daunting, and presents many challenges that have nothing to do with orthography or technology: the political aspect, education, conversion of archives and literature, and many others. It's obviously a change that no community should undertake lightly.

But languages do change scripts: about 25 in the last century, and three in the last year or so (Kazakh, Mongolian, and Inuktut). Some of these changes have been great successes, notably those where a Chinese script or an Arabic abjad was replaced by a Latin alphabet (a warning to those who favor a broadening of Ajami), like Vietnamese, Turkish, or Malay.

Nsibidi, Nwagu Aneke, and Ndẹ́bẹ́

Before Igbo was written, the Igbo people were familiar with Nsibidi ideograms, invented by the Ekoi. Nsibidi is a written language, but it's not the written form of any spoken language - it's its own language. In contrast, Musa is a way to write spoken Igbo, not a different language.

In the 1960's, an Igbo named Nwagu Aneke developed a syllabary for his Umuleri dialect. It consists of about 200 symbols, each representing a consonant+vowel syllable. The Nwagu Aneke syllabary suffers from a few deficiencies, notably the lack of symbols for syllables consisting of just a vowel (very common in Igbo), no support for tones, missing letters for sounds from other dialects (like nasal vowels), and many duplicate symbols.

A syllabary is a good choice for Igbo and many other Niger-Congo languages, and syllabaries may be easier to learn than alphabets, which is why Musa writes these languages as a syllabary. But a featural syllabary like Musa means that learning one letter makes learning another easier, and the regularities can be used to simplify keyboards.

Ndẹ́bẹ́, a modern script, is a way to write spoken Igbo, inspired by Nsibidi. It's lovely ... but not practical. Here are some of the problems:

1. A major flaw of Ọnwụ is that writers get lazy and leave off the tone diacritics. And yet Ndẹ́bẹ́ uses dots as tone diacritics.
2. Ndẹ́bẹ́ is not quick to write. For example, the word Ìgbò is written with 13 strokes, compared with only 8 in the Ọnwụ alphabet or Musa.

   

3. Another major flaw of the current Ọnwụ orthography is the lack of technical support: keyboards, fonts, and so on. For example, there's no Unicode character for the ẹ́ with both underdot and acute accent that appears twice in the name Ndẹ́bẹ́. (What you see here was encoded by composition in two different ways.)

   Ndẹ́bẹ́ is even worse! Not only are the Ndẹ́bẹ́ glyphs absent from Unicode, but it's not even clear how they would be encoded. If they were to be encoded as complete syllables, there would be a lot of them. That approach would require a lot of support on the part of keyboards and fonts, making them more difficult and thus less available.

   It would make much more sense to encode each Ndẹ́bẹ́ element on its own - stems, radicals, vowels, and tones. That would require Advanced Typography or more to compose all these elements into a single block. It's probably feasible ... but it's not easy. And even that approach would require a fairly large keyboard: 6 stems, 7 radicals, 9 vowels in 3 tones plus 1 standalone form each, plus 20+ digits and punctuation symbols: a total of about 50 keys if vowel and tone are separated. If consonants and vowels are each unified (stem + radical, vowel + tone), we end up with about 80 keys. Musa uses 26.

   A demonstration of the technical difficulty is the simple observation that as of this writing - twelve years after the invention of Ndẹ́bẹ́ - there is neither a keyboard nor a font available for Ndẹ́bẹ́ on the market (and Nigeria exports keyboards). In comparison, Musa has half a dozen keyboards and two dozen fonts available.

4. The idea of mutating consonants sounds great ... until you think about it! We already have mutating consonants in the Latin alphabet: for example, the letter j sounds different in English John, German Johann, French Jean, and Spanish Juan, which all share the same origin. But that's not a good thing - in fact, it's one of the big disadvantages of the Latin alphabet. Fixed consonants like m that have the same sound everywhere are much better.

   If we use mutating consonants, writers have to remember, when it comes time to write a word, whether that word is pronounced differently in any other dialect (in which case they should write the mutating consonants), or whether every dialect pronounces it the same (in which case they should write the fixed consonants). It's not enough to speak your dialect - you have to speak all the dialects!

   The diversity of dialects in Igbo is a challenge, but not a barrier. Igbos should simply write their own dialect - in fixed letters - and make an effort to learn to understand each other's dialects in writing as they already do in speech, just as we do in English, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese or any of the many other languages with multiple dialects. Yanks say bæth and truck, while Brits say bɑth and lorry, and that's OK. In the end, it enriches the language.

5. But even if Ndẹ́bẹ́ were ideal for all the dialects of Igbo, it could still not be used to write Yoruba, Edo, Ijaw, Efik, English or the many other languages of Nigeria and the world. When an Igbo travels to Lagos, Abuja, Kano, or another country, they won't find keyboards or fonts for Ndẹ́bẹ́. And how will they type English at home - on their other keyboard?

The big advantage of Ndẹ́bẹ́ is that it's Igbo in origin, and looks like it. It's an expression of Igbo identity, but it's not a very good orthography. I agree with all of the criticisms of Ọnwụ that Ndẹ́bẹ́'s author and many others have expressed, but Ndẹ́bẹ́ isn't the best solution.

The Musa Alphabet isn't Igbo in origin, but neither is it colonial, and it does a better job writing Igbo than Ndẹ́bẹ́ does. Because it can also write all the other languages of the world, it will have much broader use, and thus better tools. It already has fonts and keyboards, and good (but not full) digital support. Igbos could start using it tomorrow ... and they should!

Writing Igbo in Musa

In this section, we'll teach you how to write Igbo in Musa - it's easier than you might think.

The letters on yellow are not part of the Ọnwụ orthography. They aren't needed to write the Izugbe standard dialect, but they are used for other dialects.

Vowels

We'll start with the vowels:

	u		o		i		e		ẹ
	ụ		ọ		ị		a		ə

The ẹ replaces a in, for example, Item, Nsuka, Mbieri, and Abo. The ə is found in Item, Ikwo, and other dialects. Some have proposed that the letter for schwa ə be split so as to be able to indicate its vowel harmony class, but that isn't necessary phonetically: they sound alike.

Long Vowels

Within a word, two different vowels are separated in Musa by a Break , and the two are pronounced distinctly as two different syllables. But reduplicated vowels - often the result of assimilation - are pretty common, resulting in a long vowel. The current orthography simply writes the vowel twice, but Musa writes the second as a long mark . The tone of the second vowel is written on the long mark. Both the Break and the Long mark are simple vertical lines, but the Break is as tall as a consonant, while the Long mark is as short as a vowel.


táà

Nasal Vowels

Many Igbo dialects have nasalized syllables, which we attribute to the vowel (and we speak of nasal vowels). In at least some dialects, nasality is phonemic: nasal vowels contrast with oral vowels in minimal pairs. But in most dialects, the appearance or disappearance of nasal vowels is strongly conditioned by phonological context, so that nasal vowels seem allophonic. For example, vowels both before or after nasal consonants are often nasalized, vowels around fricatives may or may not be nasalized, and vowels around plosives are seldom nasalized. Some analyses attribute the nasality to the consonant in order to explain its occurence, postulating nasalized and non-nasalized pairs of fricatives.

But Musa is phonetic anyway, so we don't care whether the nasality is phonemic or phonologic! We want Musa to write the sounds of each dialect as if we were writing for people who don't speak it. We write nasal vowels by adding a nasal suffix  to the oral vowel letter, even in cases where its occurence is phonologically predictable and the oral vowel cannot occur. This nasal suffix appears in Syllabary gait as a hat above a high vowel, or as a pedestal below a low vowel.

We use the same  symbol to spell a syllabic nasal, but in this case it doesn't follow a vowel: it's preceded by the consonant that indicates the pronunciation. So far example the word nta spells the syllabic nasal as n followed by the nasal suffix, since it assimilates to the t, as if it were spelled ñta.

	
ọ́mā	ńtà
good	small

Tones

Igbo has at least three tones: high, low, and downstep. Musa writes them by varying the height of the vowel: vowels with high tone are high, and vowels with low tone are low. Vowels with downstep tone, which can only follow high tone, are written as high vowels with a falling accent mark below. Some dialects have falling or rising tones as well. Here are some examples:

					
ísí	ísì	ìsì	ísī	î	ǐ
head	smell	blindness	to cook	falling tone	rising tone

In addition to tones, Igbo uses intonation to carry meaning and/or attitude. As in other languages, intonation is written in Musa using punctuation. See the page on Intonation for the details.

Consonants

Igbo is interesting in its use of four ways to modify consonants, although none of these features occur in every dialect:

• Labialization: rounding your lips as you pronounce the consonant
• Palatalization: raising the back of your tongue as you pronounce the consonant
• Aspiration: pronouncing the consonant with a puff of breath (actually, by retarding the onset of voicing)
• Nasalization: letting some air out your nose. The effect of nasalization is to nasalize the following vowel, and that's how we write it in Musa. But it some contexts - for example, when we want to talk about the nasalized consonant without a vowel - we can write it using the prenasal prefix  as a suffix.

The chart below presents all the consonants of Standard igbo, plus numerous consonants from other dialects. It also presents the suffixes that Musa uses to create nasalized, palatalized, and labialized consonants. Aspirated consonants are shown in blue - Musa doesn't use a suffix to write them. But this chart is not exhaustive: there are undoubtedly additional consonants in some Igbo dialects, perhaps pf, ð, or the bilabial click. In most cases, Musa has a letter to write them.

							
m		n		ny	ṅ	nw	˜
	 					
b	gb	d	dz	j	g	gw
							← breathy
	 						
p	kp	t	ts	ch	k	kw	q
							← aspirated
							
vb	v	ṭ	z	ż	gh		h
						
ph	f		s	sh		sw
							
r̃	r¹	l	r	y -y		w -w	break

Notes:

• gb and kp are doubly articulated, with simultaneous closure of your lips and your tongue against your soft palate. In Enu-Onitsha, among other dialects, these sounds are pronounced as implosives: Musa then writes them with the letters on  yellow .
• Item, Ikwere, Ngwa and other dialects use aspirated or breathy consonants, which are shown on  blue  above.
• dz and ts occur in Ikwo, Nsuka, Izii, ...
• q represents a glottal stop, as found in Owere, Mbaise, ...
• vb and ph - like v and f but with both lips - occur in Adazi-Nnukwu, Awka, Ikwo, ...
• The ingressive ṭ occurs in Mbieri, Owere, Mbaise, ...
• ż occurs in Izii, Orlu, Owere, ...
• The letter labeled sw is how we spell the "whistle fricative" of Nsuka, Ikwo, ...
• The r¹ shown above is how r is pronounced and written between vowels, even in standard Igbo.
• The letter for y is also used after other consonants to indicate palatization.
• The letter for w is also used after other consonants to indicate labialization (as shown in the Musa letters for nw gw kw), for example in Ohafia, Nsuka, ...
• Item, Ikwere, and other dialects offer nasalized consonants. When plosives like b d j g are nasalized, they simply become nasals m n ny ṅ, but when fricatives like f v s z or semivowels like r y w h become nasalized, we write them with the prenasal prefix  as a suffix. However, most of the time, instead of writing the suffix, we simply mark the following vowel as nasal, using the  letter. We even write the  after nasal consonants, even though it may be redundant, so that you don't have to know Igbo to read it correctly.

Sample

Now that you know the letters, why not try to read some Igbo written in Musa?



Ìgbò na-asụ n'olu n'olu, a kwaa ụkwara ọ bụrụ otu.

A Dual Text

To illustrate what Igbo looks like written in Musa, here's a dual text: the first paragraph of the Igbo Wikipedia article on Asụ̀sụ̀ Ìgbò, first in Musa and then in the current Roman orthography for comparison. Foreign names are written in the Dushan font; the Igbo is in Njoya font.

Asụsụ Igbo bụ asụsụ Niger-Congo nke mmadụ ruru ndè iri abụọ na ise nke ndị juru na ya bụ ndị Igbo. Na ndida-owuwa anyanwụ Naijiria na ebe Niger Delta, Igbo bụ díàlà. Ha dèrè ya na édé Latin, nke ndí mpaghara Britain nwètèrè. Nkárị ndị ọzọ bụ nké Èkpè búrú nkárị Nsịbịdị. Asụsụ Igbo bụ ólú nke a na-akpọ n'ezigbo hanwa. Ọ dị ike taa ndi ọbịá ịsụta ya, dịkwa ike taa ndi Igbo ọzọ bi na ámá nkẹ ọzọ ịmátá ihe ndi nke ọzọ na-ekwu, maka na ndi Igbo na olu Igbo hiri nne. E nwere mkpụrụ edemede Igbo dị 36, ụdaume asatọ na mgbochiume ọgụ na asato.