Assessment of Language of Igue Festival in Ika Land of Delta State Nigeria: Cultural and Semantic Implications

Abstract

This work, Cultural and Semantic Implications of the language of the Igue Festival in Ika Land; is aimed at bringing out the detailed account of the Igue festival showcasing the Ika culture and tradition as well as x-raying the activities performed during the festival and the role played by some specific persons in the community. This became necessary due to the fact that, there is a decline in the understanding and use of traditional ritual expressions there by threatening the preservation of indigenous knowledge and oral traditions. Furthermore, there is relatively no study on how language conveys meaning during the Igue festival and how these meanings reflect the cultural values of Ika people, this gap creates the need for this research. In carrying out this research, the method will be anchored on interview and close reading of relevant texts. To achieve this, the researcher adopts the Saphir-Whoorfian's theory of language. This is relevant to this study because it not only see language as socially bounded but also, culturally bounded. The researcher also looked at the history and meaning of Igue festival as well its performance entailments. Furthermore, the meaning of some language/words used during the Igue festival and its cultural/semantic implications was not left out. This was done by giving both the cultural names of Igue activities as well as their English equivalents which was semantically looked at in its social and cultural context. From the findings, it was evident that the culture of the people has correlation with their language which is a true representation of the theory in use for this research work. Conclusively, we can see that language and culture are two inseparable coin as far as the Igue festival is concerned.