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Geographically, the Ika speaking people are found in the north west of Delta State. They share borders linguistically in the west with the Edo speakers, in the north with the Ishan speakers, in the East with the Aniocha language speakers and in the south with the Ukwuani speakers. Politically, Ika speakers are mainly found in two local government areas, Ika North East and Ika South local government areas, both created in 1991 from a single Ika Local Government Area, in Delta State. Ika South and Ika North East local government areas, occupy a land area of 117.45 square kilometres (Delta State Government website, 1999) with a total population of about 240,000 people. There are other Ika speaking people that are political outside the Ika North east and Ika South local government areas. The exact population of speakers of the Ika language or those with Ika as mother tongue is not known since this information was not included in the 1991 census result (1991 census). Ika people do not have any shared physical characteristics distinguishing it from other ethnic or language groups in Delta State. In this work, Ika North East and Ika South local government areas of Delta State, will be referred to as the Ika community although there are some Ika language speaking areas (i.e. Igbanke) outside these two local government areas. The Ika community is made up of eleven independent groups, which I will refer to as clans, and a metropolis. All eleven Ika clans speak a common language, the Ika language, with a cluster of dialects, which belongs to the Igboid group (Williamson 1968). There are however, no significant differences between these dialects but mainly phonological and lexical variation. |
