ABSTRACT
Language is a potent weapon through which concepts, ideas, thoughts, messages, information, cultural beliefs are communicated and exchanged between group of people to ensure inter-personal relationship, identity and sense of belonging in a society, Moreso, it (language) is a symbol of people’s identity and a means of identifying people’s value system. This is indeed particularly true of naming system which is done using language. Names are believed to be a symbol of people’s identity in every human society, of which Etsako is not an exemption. Without names or the adoption of naming system in a community of people, there may be misplaced identity, also, naming or names originally reveals the particular culture of a people owing to the fact that different group of people to the other(s), so the system of giving names, majorly personal names. This study/research examines the naming system of Etsako, using personal names as a case study, hence a pragmatic analysis of their naming system.
This study is carried out by adopting Lawal's (1997) pragmatic model (theory) as the theoretical framework of the study, because of its crucial and numerous advantages as the model accounts for various variable that make it easy and possible to study and analyze the contextual aspects of some concepts like naming system. Some of the variables that are embedded in Lawal’s (1997) model are enshrined in situational context, sociological contexts, social and cosmological contexts of phenomenon like the naming system.
The methodology of the research is also explored here, as the method of data collection was through direct oral interviews of the competent speakers of the language and who has in-dept understanding of how naming system work in the language (Etsako).
