Contrastive Study of The Pragmatic and Socio-cultural Implications of Greeting Patterns of the English and Orokam People of Benue State

Greeting is a socio-cultural aspect of every society and a medium of expressing one’s feeling about others in a society. As people are different universally, so are their cultural values which make them distinctive. Greeting is one of the core values that every society cherishes. The greeting patterns in the English and Orokam-Idoma languages are entirely different in structures and purposes, this indeed creates a gap that needs to be filled. It is on this note that this paper examines the similarities and the differences between the English and Orokam-Idoma languages in the area of greetings. The study is anchored on the frameworks of ethnography of communication and contextual theory of pragmatics. A qualitative exploratory design was employed to exhume the perceptions of the respondents on the greeting patterns and its impact on the study group. The study also used the qualitative ethnographic methods, which include the participant observation (PO) and in-depth interviews (IDI) granted to the indigenous people of Orokam in order to elicit detailed information from the randomly selected fifteen participants; three each from the five clans of Orokam (Iyru, Ona, Oko, Akor and Agboriko) in Ogbadibo Local Government Area of Benue State, Middle Belt (North Central) Nigeria. Data were collated in Orokam dialect of Idoma language. The findings of the study revealed that there are sharp differences between the English and Orokam-Idoma languages’ greeting patterns in the areas of complimentary, burial, childbirth, farewell, seasonal and family/clan greetings. The only area of similarity between the English and Orokam-Idoma greeting/politeness pattern is that of abuse/abusive greetings. The study recommends that government at all levels should encourage the use of traditional greetings in all societies to encourage the proliferation of cultural norms, greetings, and beliefs to educate the younger generations and to encourage the survival of indigenous languages.