A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF AFRICAN PROVERBS IN A NIGERIAN MOVIE: LIONHEART

This research carries out a sociolinguistic study of African proverbs. One of the aims of this work is to explore and show how African proverbs are used in a Nigerian movie from a sociolinguistic perspective in the context of English as a second language in Nigeria. This will go a long way to offer a sociolinguistic insight into the contributions of African languages, cultures and way of life in the sociolinguistic context of English as a second language. The data for the study were sourced and collected from the Nigerian movie Lionheart (2018), where native speakers of the language used the proverbs from a contextual point of view and other variables. The qualitative and analytic research designs were adopted for the analysis. In all, ten (10) proverbs were analysed using Dell Hymes’ Ethnography of Communication theory as the theoretical framework. This is because of the SPEAKING model, which accounts for such sociolinguistic variables as Settings, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Keys, Instrumentalities, Norms, and Genre, as evidenced in the data. On typology, Adedimeji’s (2003) typological classification is applied for the classification of the data into different perspectives. This work affirms that the SPEAKING model allows for a comprehensive understanding of the data for this study as a result of its explicit and analytical potential.