The ethnopragmatics of Yoruba personal names: Language in the context of culture

Abstract

While the subject of Yoruba names has been significantly explored by previous studies, this paper discusses extensively the nature of such names from an ethnopragmatic framework, with the aim of explicating how Yoruba names are formed, their various cultural contexts as well as the significant functions they play in the Yoruba ethnolinguistic ecology. It identifies and categorizes personal names based on contexts such as family situation, circumstantces of birth, religious orientation, death situation and profession. This paper reinforces that names are not just arbitrary labels, but most notably, linguistic categories – lexical, phrasal or sentential – that have indexical relationship to sociocultural meanings and functions, places, time, people, and events.

Keywords

• ethnopragmatics
• Yoruba
• names
• context of situation
• culture