Urhobo

Urhobo is spoken by the Urhobo people mainly in Delta State, in areas including Warri, Ughelli, Sapele, Orerokpe and surrounding communities in the Niger Delta. It is closely related to, but distinct from, Isoko, spoken by the neighbouring Isoko people, and the two are sometimes grouped together as part of a wider Urhobo-Isoko cluster within Edoid languages while remaining separate languages with their own identities. Urhobo has considerable internal dialect variation, with clusters of dialects associated with different clans and towns, and a standardised or common variety used in writing, radio broadcasting and church contexts, while day-to-day speech varies more between communities. It is used in local radio and television programming in Delta State, in traditional religious and cultural practice such as masquerade and festival songs, in gospel and highlife-influenced music, and to a more limited extent in schools, though English remains dominant in formal education. Urhobo continues to be actively spoken across generations in much of its home area, though as with many Nigerian languages, urban youth increasingly mix it with English and Nigerian Pidgin.

Urhobo is written in a Latin-based orthography that includes subdots for particular vowel qualities and uses diacritic tone marks in careful or academic writing to distinguish words that differ only in tone, though tone marking is frequently simplified or dropped in everyday use. Dictionaries and grammatical descriptions compiled by Urhobo scholars and linguists, including community-produced dictionaries, have contributed to a broadly agreed spelling convention, though some variation between dialect-influenced spellings persists. There is no indigenous script historically associated with Urhobo; it has always been transmitted primarily as a spoken language, with a Latin-based written form developed through mission and later academic and community documentation efforts.