You have no items in your shopping cart.
ABSTRACT
It can be said that greetings has great effect on the culture, tradition and way of living of the Igbos. Greeting can help in improving the social and moral standard of every community and traditional values of every nation: to give a comprehensive socio-linguistic analysis of Igbo traditional greetings: to analyze the impact a dearth of this traditional greeting would cause to the Igbo tradition: to compare the similarities and dissimilarities between Igbo greetings and English greetings. The study apart from giving a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic structure of Igbo traditional greetings would also look at the social impact and cultural implications of its use. Since research is always linked with decision-making, this study will provide other scholars, community leaders and the country at large a detailed insight of the structure of Igbo traditional greetings and its linguistic structure. Students of linguistics may find this work useful in their research studies. The study apart from providing the basis for the redirection of the way Igbo traditional greetings is used will also add its overall significance to the contribution to knowledge. Klineberg’s (1982) essay which focused on the historical perspective of some aspects of theory and research in the area of contact between ethnic groups would be an appropriate reference material here. The study encompasses the entire South-East region of Nigeria where the Igbo language is spoken. The data for this study will be gotten from secondary sources, i.e. from relevant literatures and journals, and also from works of renowned scholars. A few citations will be gotten from mouth to mouth interviews. All of these will be blended to give a perfect historical background of the subject matter. The major result of this project work will leave no doubt in giving a comprehensive socio-linguistic study of Igbo greeting system. This study borders on the socio-linguistic analysis of Igbo traditional greetings. Igbo traditional greetings results amounts to lots of words, phrases and sentences which results in a large amount of data. The avalanche of data generated may require hundreds of computers to analyze. For this reason, a purposive decision was made to limit the study to though a wide range of words, phrases and sentences, these represent only a fraction of the entire vocabulary used in Igbo traditional greetings. Greeting is to the Igbo people a situation in which neither the greeter nor the person greeted loses. It is a metaphorical penny.
