Orality and Literacy Interface in the Composition of Contemporary Igbo Gospel Music: A Linguistic Study

This study linguistically analyses the interface between orality and literacy in the composition and performance of contemporary Igbo gospel music, examining how composers draw on oral traditional resources and literate register conventions to create a hybrid musical-linguistic genre. Igbo gospel music has emerged as one of the most dynamic and widely consumed cultural products of Igbo Christianity over the past decade, yet its linguistic composition strategies and their relationship to both oral literature and written Igbo remain unstudied. The research corpus consists of lyric transcriptions and audio recordings of one hundred and twenty Igbo gospel songs released between 2019 and 2024 by composers from the South East and South South regions. Linguistic analysis examines orality markers including formulaic language, proverb integration, call-and-response patterning, and mnemonic repetition, alongside literacy markers such as syntactic complexity, nominal density, and written register vocabulary. Findings reveal a composite orality-literacy profile that varies systematically with musical sub-genre: worship songs exhibit higher literacy orientation while praise and spiritual warfare genres demonstrate stronger oral literature patterning. Female composers demonstrate greater structural innovation in the negotiation of oral-literate interfaces than male counterparts. The study contributes to both Igbo linguistic studies and African music-language scholarship. Keywords: Igbo gospel music, orality, literacy, linguistic analysis, composition.