Documentation of Igbo Agricultural Vocabulary in Transition: A Case Study of Farming Communities in Ezza, Ebonyi State

This study documents Igbo agricultural vocabulary in the farming communities of Ezza in Ebonyi State, South East Nigeria, with particular attention to the changes and losses occurring within this lexical domain as traditional farming practices give way to modern agricultural methods. Agricultural vocabulary represents one of the culturally richest lexical fields in Igbo, encoding indigenous environmental knowledge, ecological relationships, and seasonal farming calendars developed over centuries. The shift towards commercial farming, synthetic inputs, and mechanised agriculture has progressively rendered significant portions of this vocabulary functionally redundant and cognitively inaccessible to younger speakers. Fieldwork involving thirty-eight elderly farmers aged fifty-five and above yields a primary corpus of seven hundred and twelve distinct agricultural terms across fourteen semantic categories including soil types, crop varieties, planting rituals, harvesting practices, and farm tool nomenclature. Comparative elicitation from forty younger farmers aged twenty to forty reveals a seventy-one percent recognition gap for traditional agricultural terms. The study argues that agricultural vocabulary attrition constitutes not merely linguistic loss but the erosion of community ecological knowledge that has adaptive and food security implications. Archival recommendations and a sample digital Igbo agricultural lexicon structure are proposed. Keywords: Igbo agricultural vocabulary, Ezza, Ebonyi State, language documentation, ecological knowledge.