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Can you imagine there being a community where boys and girls growing up together can finally speak different languages? In Ubang Nigeria, it really happens. It’s not exactly clear what percentage of the words in the men’s and women’s languages are different, but there are enough examples to make sentences sound different when spoken by the opposite sex. For “clothing”, men use the word “nki”, while women say “ariga”; “kitchi” means tree for men, while women say “okweng”. These are not just some slight pronunciation differences, but totally different words. “It’s almost like two different lexicons (词汇集),” a language expert, Chi Chi Undle said. “There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, but there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don’t sound alike, and don’t have the same letters. They are completely different words.”

Interestingly, both men and women are able to understand each other perfectly in Ubang, as both boys and girls grow up around their parents and get to learn both languages, but by the age of 10, boys are expected to speak in the male tongue. It seems that there is a stage the male will reach and he discovers he is not using the rightful language. When he starts speaking the men’s language, you know the maturity is coming into him.

No one really knows how or why the double-language tradition of Ubang began. Chi Chi Undie believes the two languages are the result of a “double-sex culture” where men and women operate in two separate spheres (范围) and live in separate worlds that rarely come together. However, she admits this is a weak theory, as the double-sex culture is present in many parts of Africa, where there are no different languages for men and women.

Today, with English words constantly entering the lexicon of young Nigerians, Ubang’s two languages are in danger of being lost forever. Worse still, neither the male nor female language is written down, so they both rely on young people passing them down to the next generation.