A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Ogba Proverbs as Tools for Cohesion

Abstract

Sociolinguistics means many things to different people. It is a field that studies the relationship between the users of language and the social structures in which they live. “A sociolinguistic analysis of Ogba proverbs” focuses on the study of Ogba proverbs, exploring the sociolinguistic aspects. Its aim is to explore and analyse Ogba proverbs from the sociolinguistic perspective in the context of English as a second language in Nigeria. This will go a long way to offer a sociolinguistic insight to the contributions of Ogba language, culture and way of life. The data for the study were collected orally through interviews of competent Ogba first language speakers and translated to the English language for analysis. The qualitative and descriptive research designs were adopted for the analysis. In all, twenty (20) proverbs were analysed using Dell Hyme’s Ethnography of Communication Theory as the major analytical framework with insights from Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This is because of the relevance of Dell Hyme’s Speaking which accounts for such sociolinguistic variables as setting, scene, participants, act sequence, instrumentality and genre as is evidenced in the data, and how the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis allows this paper to relate its data to aspects of Ogba worldview and culture. This paper establishes that Ogba proverbs are relevant to both oral and written communications within and outside the Ogba environment. They are employed to embellish, spice and beautify oral and written communications commonly but proudly exploited in Ogba people’s interpersonal relations through conversations. On typology, Adedimeji’s (2003) typological classification is applied for the classification of the data into types. It was discovered that Speaking allows for the comprehensive understanding of the data for this paper which is as a result of its explicit and analytic potential, while Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis shows aspects of Ogba Culture that manifest in Ogba proverbs.