Digital Preservation of Endangered Igbo Dialects: A Framework for Community-Based Linguistic Archiving in South East Nigeria

This dissertation develops and evaluates an original framework for the community-based digital preservation of endangered Igbo dialects in South East Nigeria, integrating language documentation science, digital archiving standards, community participatory research methods, and indigenous data sovereignty principles into a replicable operational model. Several Igbo dialectal varieties, including Ika-Delta, Ogba-Rivers, and Izon-contact Igbo, face extinction within one to two generations based on current speaker demographic profiles, yet existing documentation resources are fragmentary and archived in formats inaccessible to source communities. The dissertation is grounded in a four-year documentation and framework development programme conducted across six endangered dialect communities, employing community-based participatory research methods throughout the documentation, archiving, and framework validation stages. Original audio-visual documentation of three target dialects, comprising over two hundred hours of recorded material including natural conversation, oral literature, and metalinguistic elicitation, is produced and archived following ELAR and AILLA archival standards. The community-based archiving framework developed addresses governance, metadata standards, community access protocols, long-term maintenance, and repatriation rights in a form adapted to the institutional capacities of South East Nigerian community organisations. Framework evaluation through community feedback and expert panel review confirms its operational feasibility and cultural acceptability. The dissertation makes original contributions to language documentation methodology and indigenous language archiving theory. Keywords: endangered Igbo dialects, digital preservation, language documentation, community archiving, indigenous data sovereignty.