In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

Are there children in your life who want to learn Ibibio? This is the perfect dictionary! Included are pages filled with bright and colorful pictures and bilingual labels to help teach Ibibio words to English speaking children. Parents, teachers, and gift givers will find: 1000+ illustrations of familiar objects Pictures labeled with the English word followed by its Ibibio equivalent Phonetic spellings the words Words grouped by themes This dictionary is a fun way for young English-speaking children to build a basic vocabulary in Ibibio. It's never too soon to start teaching boys and girls a second language! Perfect for children of all ages, these references employ stunning illustrations and photographs to bring to life the meanings of hundreds of essential terms. Filled with beautiful spreads, each pictorially defines many objects, people, concepts, and actions common to the everyday world of It makes gentle introductions, it is a great way to introduce the language. The book features, A fun and easy way for young language students to expand their vocabulary and broaden their knowledge. More than 1,000 images of familiar objects are labeled in Ibibio and English, and structured by subject including: Animals, Action words, Colors, Position words, Directions, Numbers, Colo(u)rs... and many more! Ideal for learners of all ages at school or at home, as well as teachers who can use it as a tool in the classrooms Learn Common words in the Ibibio Language. Numbers, Colo(u)rs, Professions, Differences, Body Parts, Emotions, Alphabets, Farm Animals, Fruits & Vegetables, Greetings, Questions, Buildings, Weather, Time, Positions, Postures, Transportations and many more

The first global history of African linguistics as an emerging autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

This book provides an overview of a recent and flexible approach to speech synthesis design to develop the first statistical parametric speech synthesizer for Ibibio, a West African tonal language. The design precludes the inflexibility encountered when modeling tonal features of the language and can be used for other tonal African languages. Mobile use and technological innovations in developing African nations have exploded. With mobile technology, many of the barriers caused by infrastructure issues have vanished. In order to address issues that are unique to African tonal languages, the book uses Ibibio as a model. The text reviews the language's speech characteristics, required for building the front end components of the design and propose a finite state transducer (FST), useful for modelling the language’s tonetactics. The statistical parametric approach discussed in the text, implements the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique, with the goal of creating a generic structure that learns the model from the text itself, and uses the data-driven approach to input specification.