Ìgbò personal names: A morpho-semantic study

This article focuses on the morphology and semantics of personal names in the Ìgbò language of Nigeria, West Africa. Ìgbò is one of the three major languages of Nigeria, with the other two being Hausa and Yoruba. This work is based on data from the Ògbahù dialect of Ìgbò, for the enrichment and better understanding of the Ìgbò language. It is established in this article that Ìgbò personal names consist of both underived and derived lexical items, particularly compound names which are highly preponderant, hence they are the concern of this article. The article represents a preliminary work on Ìgbò personal names, vis-à-vis the interpenetration of morphology, phonology, lexicon, syntax and semantics. The view of this article is that personal names in Ìgbò are not mere labels for identification – they constitute a special class of noun compounds, derived by a concatenation of words of at least two components. The morphology and semantics of these nouns reflect the cultural milieu of the Ìgbò people. Furthermore, the names are not just a concatenation of words – they have both socio-cultural and semantic implications underlying them.