Agbirigba
Agbirigba is a cant 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. Some speakers add an epenthetic vowel to break up the resulting consonant cluster.
Derivation
The addition of the t results in consonant clusters 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, 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 is complex, then the first element of that tone will move to the epenthetic vowel.
;Examples
becomes:
- ńtkéttʃí tvò tré ítdʒí
- ńtíkétítʃí tùvò tíré ítídʒí
- ŋ́gɔ́zɪ́ wṹ lêm "Ngozi died"
- ńtgɔ́tzɪ́ twṹ tlêm
- ńtʊ́gɔ́tɪ́zɪ́ tṹwṹ tílèm