A SOCIO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF KINSHIP TERMS IN ENGLISH, IGBO AND YORUBA LANGUAGES
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2014
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Abstract
This study carries out a socio-semantic analysis of kinship terms in English, Igbo and Yoruba. The English language is an Indo-European language of West Germanic language family (Comrie 1987, p.68). Igbo/Yoruba languages belong to Kwa language sub-family under Niger-Kordofanian language family (Ibid: 961-970). It is erroneously believed that English language is richer in kinship terms than Igbo and Yoruba languages. This paper argues on the contrary that though English is widely spoken among the Igbos and the Yorubas, their languages also have equivalents of English kinship terms and beyond but cultural and social milieu did not permit the usages of the kinship terms. This study is descriptive. The paper adopts a comparative approach in the analysis of the data for the study in order to find out the areas of convergence and divergence in kinship terms in English, Igbo and Yoruba languages. The methods of data collection include the English kinship terms lifted from available reading materials, radio and television, oral interviews conducted with the elderly native speakers of Yoruba and personal observations of the present researchers as native speakers of Igbo, one of the languages under study. The result of the study shows that none of the languages is proficient than the other in the use of kinship terms. This paper concludes that kinship terms in English are hardly synonymous with those of Igbo and Yoruba because of differences in the cultural and family systems between Igbo, Yoruba and English.
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Family, Kinship, English, Igbo and Yoruba