Ebook: A grammar of Izi, an Igbo language

Norman: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma, 1975. — 283 p. — ISBN 0-88312-057-7.The Izi language is spoken by approximately 200,000 people In the East-Central State of Nigeria. They live in an area around and to the east of Abakaliki, extending to the north just over the boundary between East-Central State and Benue-Flateau State, to the east as far as the State boundary and to the south to about twelve miles north of the Cross River.
All the people indigenous to this area recognise themselves as Izi and distinguish themselves from their neighbours. Though there are various clans and in spite of the fact that the whole group is scattered over quite a large area, only very minor language differences have been observed. It can be stated that within Izi there are no dialects.
Izi is closely related to neighbouring Ezaa and Ikwo, the three forming a dialect cluster which can be regarded as constituting a language within the Igbo language group, which may, for convenience, be called North-eastern Igbo. No previous study of any of these three dialects is known to the authors.
Some comparative work covering the Igbo language group has been attempted in recent years, though a great deal of work remains to be done. These initial studies suggest that it is realistic to consider Izi, Ezaa and Ikwo as constituting the North-eastern Igbo language, sufficiently different from Central Igbo to be regarded as a separate language within an ïgbo language group. When Izi, Ezaa and Ikwo are compared with one another, they give lexico-statistical scores of around 95%; but when the three are compared with the Central Igbo dialects, the scores drop sharply to the 80% area.