A Linguistic Tour in Southern Nigeria. Certain Problems Re-stated

Opening Paragraph A six-months' tour in Southern Nigeria has afforded a valuable opportunity for review of certain questions about the chief languages of this part of West Africa and for a re-statement of the problems connected with them. The main questions are: 1. With what success can one dialect be used as a literary medium? 2. Is the new orthography suggested by the Institute suitable for the purposes for which it was designed? 3. Are educated Africans interested in their own language and its development? 4. Can Europeans learn to speak these languages with any degree of accuracy ? 5. What are the present needs, and what lines should future work take? I can here express on these points only my own views, based on the experience of my tour and my work previous and subsequent to it. The two districts with which this article is mainly concerned are the Efik and Ibo speaking areas in Southern Nigeria.