Abstract

This work sets out to investigate the sociolinguistic significance of the Anaŋkobi annual Festival in Oshie. In doing so, it has as objectives to investigate the structure and function of the language used in the festival, with emphasis on the syntax. It also describes the socio-cultural impact of the language use.

Data collection instruments for the study include interviews, questionnaires, tape recorder, pen, pencil and note book. The data was analyzed using the sociolinguistics descriptive framework with emphasis on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis and the structural generative syntax.

The study is significance to the Oshie people in that it exposes the cultural values and ideologies of the Oshie people, their history and adds to the existing linguistic literature on the language in particular and Cameroonian in general.

CHAPTER ONE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1.2 Introduction   

Language is defined by Terence Willey (1968) as a means of communication for social intercourse. In other words it is what the members of a particular society speak during social interactions. This study seeks to investigate the contribution of language to one of the most important festivals in Oshie. In other words, it examines the significance of language use in the Anankobi Annual Festival in Oshie.

Language is seen to play a vital role in most social contexts in a community. This is reflected in Wolf (2000:275), cited by Heine and Nurse “…language exist because there is a society to which language belongs and whose members use the language as a vehicle of social and cultural communication…”

According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary “a festival is a series of performances of music, plays, films, movies and many others, usually organized in the same place once a year; a series of public events connected with a particular activity or idea.

The Anankobi Annual festival is an annual period in Oshie where members of the Oshie community and others including neighboring villages come together to celebrate the Oshie culture, teach the growing youths and children the dialect and for people to understand that unity reigns in the Oshie clan. This dance brings out many socio-linguistic aspects such as language and power relationship, language and culture, language inequality in addition to aspects of non-verbal communication. In this study, we shall also be looking at the impact of globalization on language, one of which is language endangerment.

This chapter gives general background information on the language as it presents the introduction, statement of the problem, aims/and objectives, the significance of the research, geographical location as well as the historical background and the socio-linguistic situation. It also presents the scope of the work, theoretical frame work, methodology, literature review, organization of the work and linguistic classification of Oshie.

1.2 Statement of the problem

The essence of this work is to investigate the significance of language use in the Anankobi Annual Festival in the Oshie community. This is because of the works done in the language, very little or nothing has been done to investigate and describe these aspects of language that are portrayed by the festival. So it is for this reason that this study sets out to describe the linguistics aspects that are brought out during the festival.

1.3 Aims/ and objective

The aim of this work is to examine the significance of language use in the Anankobi Annual Festival to the Oshie community in particular and to the entire linguistic world. To achieve this goal, the study will meet the following objectives: It will look at the organizational structure of language used in the festival with particular emphasis on syntax and semantics, and aspects of non-verbal communication that are portrayed during the festival.

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