A SOCIOLINGUISTICS STUDY OF URHOBO PROVERBS

ABSTRACT

This research carries out a sociolinguistic study of Urhobo proverbs. It’s goal is to examine and analyze Urhobo proverbs from a sociolinguistic view in the context of English as a second language in Nigeria. This will go a long way to offer a sociolinguistic insight to the support of Urhobo language, culture and way of life in the sociolinguistic context of English as a second language. The data for the study was acquired and collected orally from a native speaker of the Urhobo of the Urhobo language also from the context of use and Urhobo music. The analytic research designs were adopted for the analysis. In all, the forty (40) proverbs were analyzed using Dell Hyme’s Ethnography of communication theory as the main analytical framework with insights from Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis. This is because of the relevance of Dell Hyme’s speaking which states for such sociolinguistic variables as the English translations, analysis and meaning, typology as is showed as evidenced in the data; and how the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis allows this study to relate its data to aspects of Urhobo world view and culture. On typology, Adedimeji’s typological (typology) classification is applied for the classification of the data into types. It was therefore known that speaking permits for a comprehensive understanding of the data for the study as a result of its analytic potentials while Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis shows aspect of Urhobo culture that present in Urhobo proverbs.