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"document": "Agbirigba is a cant (or argot) 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.\nAgbirigba is unintelligible to other speakers of Ikwerre, but the rule for its derivation is simple: the consonant t is added before every CV syllable (or, more accurately, every CV mora). Some speakers add an epenthetic vowel to break up the resulting consonant cluster.\nThe 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 (one of the four vowels /i ɪ u ʊ/), and match the subsequent vowel in ATR, backness, nasality and tone.An NCV sequence becomes NtCV. For example, m̀fù 'horn' becomes ǹtfù or ǹtùfù.\nThere 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 (whether CV or CVV) is complex (rising or falling), then the first element of that tone will move to the epenthetic vowel.\n", |
