Medefaidrin

Medefaidrin (Medefidrin), or Obεri Ɔkaimε, is an artificial language and script created as a Christian sacred language by an Ibibio congregation in 1930s Nigeria. It has its roots in glossolalia ('speaking in tongues').

Speakers consider Medefidrin to be a 'spirit language'. It was created by two leaders of the church, Michael Ukpong and Akpan Akpan Udofia. They report that the Holy Spirit revealed the words of the language to Ukpong, while Udofia wrote them down. At the time Ibibio was not a written language, and Udofia created a script to write Medefidrin.

After finalizing the language in 1936, members of the church started a school in which children were instructed in Medefidrin. This was not tolerated by the British colonial government, who closed the school that same year. Nonetheless, the language continued to be used for church activities, including liturgy and hymns, and for letters and written contracts between members. The language faded from use, but in 1986 Udofia began teaching it again in the church's Sunday school in Ididep. Old manuscripts in the script are in poor condition, and in the 21st century there has been some effort to preserve them.

In structure, the language is largely a relexification of English, though the semantics are closer to the native language of its users, Ibibio. Medefrin is a stress-accented rather than tonal language, though this may be changing under Ibibio influence. There are several consonant clusters that do not exist in English. (Ibibio has no consonant clusters.) The definite article is dei, and several prepositions alliterate or rhyme with their English equivalents: su "to", fra "from", nai "by", kin "in". Most words, however, resemble nothing in English or Ibibio, but appear to have been created without a specific underlying system. The morphology is not highly developed, but a few elements have been taken from English, such as the plural in -s (z?). The vigesimal numbering system, however, and the calendar, reflect Ibibio norms. The calendar year contains sixteen four-week months.^[2]

The script has upper- and lower-case letters like the English alphabet,^[3] but the letters were invented and there is no systematic relationship between glyph and sound. There are a number of arbitrary digraphs, whose pronunciation cannot be determined from their component letters, again as in English.

See also

• the 20th-century Eskayan language and script of the Philippines
• the embryonic 12th-century Lingua Ignota and script of Germany

Bibliography

• Monday B. Abasiattai (1989) The Oberi Okaime Christian mission: Towards a history of an Ibibio independent church. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 59: 496-516.
• R. F. G. Adams (1947) Obεri Ɔkaimε: A new African language and script Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 17 : 24-34.
• Dafydd Gibbon, Moses Ekpenyong & Eno-Abasi Urua (2010) Medefaidrin: Resources documenting the birth and death language life-cycle, in Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), May19–21, Valletta, Malta, ISBN 2-9517408-6-7.
• Dafydd Gibbon & Eno-Abasi Urua (2009) "Preserving and understanding the Medefaidrin language (of the Obεri Ɔkaimε ('Church freely given') Ibibio community)" WOCAL 6, Cologne.
• Kathleen Hau (1961) Oberi Okaime script, texts and counting systems. In: Bulletin de l'Institut Francais d'Afrique Noire. Série B, Sciences humaines, 23: 291-308.
• Akpan Akpan Udofia (1953) Dictionary, transcriptions and translations of texts. In: Hau, Kathleen (1953). Oberi Okaime Script, Texts and Counting System. Material relating to the Oberi Okaime language of southeastern Nigeria.
• Eno-Abasi Urua (2008) Medefidrin, the 'Spirit' language of the 1920s in Ibibio land

References