Medefaidrin (Medefidrin), or ', is a constructed language and script created as a Christian

sacred language A sacred language, liturgical language or holy language is a language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons (like church service) by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives. Some religions, or part ...

by an Ibibio congregation in 1930s Nigeria. It has its roots in glossolalia ('speaking in tongues').

History

Speakers consider Medefaidrin to be a 'spirit language'. It was created by two leaders of the church, Michael Ukpong and Akpan Akpan Udofia. They state that the

Holy Spirit The Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the Holy Ghost, is a concept within the Abrahamic religions. In Judaism, the Holy Spirit is understood as the divine quality or force of God manifesting in the world, particularly in acts of prophecy, creati ...

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 Medefaidrin. After finalizing the language in 1936, members of the church started a school in which children were instructed in Medefaidrin. 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.

Phonology

Medefaidrin is a stress-accented rather than tonal language, though this may be changing under Ibibio influence. Unlike the Ibibio language, there are several

consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

s in Medefaidrin, many of which do not exist in English.

Writing system

The script has upper- and lower-case letters like the English alphabet, 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.

Unicode

Medefaidrin script was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in June 2018 with the release of version 11.0. The Unicode block for Medefaidrin is U+16E40–U+16E9F and contains 91 characters:

Grammar

Structurally, the language is largely a

relexification In linguistics, relexification is a mechanism of language change by which one language changes much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, to the lexicon of another language, without drastically changing the relexified language's grammar ...

of English, although the

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

are closer to the native language of its users, Ibibio. The definite article is ''dei'', and several prepositions alliterate or rhyme with their English equivalents: ' "to", ' "from", ' "by", ' "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?).

Numbers and dates

The

vigesimal A vigesimal ( ) or base-20 (base-score) numeral system is based on 20 (number), twenty (in the same way in which the decimal, decimal numeral system is based on 10 (number), ten). ''wikt:vigesimal#English, Vigesimal'' is derived from the Latin a ...

numbering system and calendar reflect Ibibio norms. The calendar year contains sixteen four-week months.

Notes

References

Bibliography

* * * * * * * {{Constructed languages Constructed languages Constructed languages introduced in the 1930s Christian liturgical languages Constructed scripts Languages of Nigeria Language and mysticism Sacred languages