Vocabulary

Words from the water: Okrika fishing vocabulary

Night nets, lamp-light on sleeping mullet and mudskippers chased into their holes. A short tour of the fishing words in Sika’s dictionary.

Kịrịkẹnị editors · 3 October 2026 · 4 min read

Okrika sits on an island in the Bonny River, among creeks and mangrove, and its language shows it. Levi Sika’s dictionary tags more than a hundred and twenty entries as fish, and Roger Blench drew on Richard Freeman’s notes on Kịrịkẹ fish names to add scientific names to many of them. Alongside the fish are the methods and the gear, each with its own word.

Ways of fishing

Many fishing words describe a whole technique. Some are worked by night, some at a particular tide, and several, as Sika notes, were mostly carried out by women.

ḅìlèmèmethod of fishing with net, usually carried out by night dàáfishing for mullet in the mangrove creeks, where light dazzles the floating, sleeping fish ḅárádéfishing for mudskippers, mostly by women, who rush them into holes in the swamp and pull them out ápụ́rá-sárácast-net fishing for tilapia, with rotten cassava rind spread to draw the fish on the flowing tide chụ́achị̀ẹ̀spear fishing by the weir at the open sea, watching from the canoe ḅùchị̀ẹ̀waiting silently on a mangrove branch to spear fish drawn in by bait

Gear

sụ̀bàhooked spear mostly used in fishing nèmbèfishing weir set at the side of the mangrove bush, worked single-handed ḅụ̀kụ̀rụ́a fishing net hemmed with cane, mostly used by women ọ̀mọ̀nbụ̀lọ̀ḅàfloats tied to the top line of a net to keep it up ókpókóróbox-like trap for red land-crabs

A few of the fish

The fish entries range from everyday catches to the sharks and rays of the open water. Some have more than one name: the bonga shad is both kígbó and òkílò.

kígbóbonga shad, Ethmalosa fimbriata ẹ̀lẹ́fish of the mullet group, fond of black swamp and usually full of fat sị̀ngị́catfish álápónìatongue-sole, Cynoglossus spp.àabàhammer-headed shark, Sphyrna spp.ówókúremora or sharksucker, which clings on with a disc on its head

If you fish in Okrika waters, or grew up hearing these words, you can help: recordings of how they are said, and names for fish that are missing, are some of the most useful contributions the dictionary can receive.

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