Linguistic Documentation of Igbo Tones and Phrases
An audio recording of Igbo spoken phrases and English translations, originally captured on a wax cylinder in 1911. The audio features a male speaker providing rhythmic Igbo linguistic samples, with Northcote Thomas providing the English translations. The content includes phrases consistent with proverbs or riddles, such as those concerning ghosts, eggs, and bridges. This recording was collected during Thomas's anthropological surveys in the Awka District.
Community Notes
Onyeka Nwokike
Jun 01, 2026
The recording, identified as NWT 505, is titled Spoken sentences in Igbo and is held in the British Library Sound Archive (C51/2785). Duplicates of Thomas's wax cylinder recordings were deposited in 1914 at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Horniman Museum in South London.
Onyeka Nwokike
Jun 01, 2026
During his 1911 survey in the Awka District, Thomas worked with a junior interpreter named Alfred Nwile, who assisted in collecting both linguistic and botanical specimens. Thomas used a wax cylinder phonograph recorder to capture what he termed specimens of language, a method designed for scientific documentation for colonial officials and researchers, as detailed in [Re:]Entanglements - Experiments in Language. He specifically titled his reports regarding Igbo-speaking peoples to maintain a distinction between linguistic ability and ethnic identity.
Onyeka Nwokike
Jun 01, 2026
The content of this recording is associated with Part VI of the 1914 Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria, which focuses on proverbs, stories, and tones. Thomas noted that the proverbs were collected from various towns in the Asaba district and deliberately avoided systematizing the transcription to preserve the differences in pronunciation found between towns.
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