LEXICOGRAPHY OF ETUNO LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

This work titled ‘Lexicography of Etuno Language’ has investigated an aspect of Etuno language, with the aim of compiling a mini Etuno-English bilingual dictionary. This study focused on the lexicon of Etuno language, a language of the Edoid group of the Niger Congo language family. The motivation for this work is the absence of a dictionary for the Etuno language and the possible extinction of the language. Data for this work was gathered, using in-depth interview method, using a wordlist, which is the SIL COMPARATIVE AFRICAN WORDLIST (SILCAWL), provided by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), as the research instrument. Other sources were also consulted, such as textbooks and other books on the history of the Etuno language and people. The analysis involved the provision of the pronunciation, meanings and grammatical categories of the various lexical items collected, hence forming an Etuno-English bilingual dictionary. The study found out that the lexical items of a language represent an important aspect of that language and a documentation of these lexical items is an important part of the documentation of a language.