TOWARDS A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE DEVIATIONS AND CHANGING PATTERNS IN IGBO PERSONAL AND PLACE NAME FORMS AN ORTHOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Personal and place names (anthroponyms and toponyms) as an integral part of an identity, have been observed to have shifted from being meaning – oriented to being aesthetically given in the contemporary Igbo society. This study therefore, investigates the fundamental influence and ideology that informed this change in Igbo naming system and unearth the Anglicized twist given to Igbo spellings of our personal and place names. The descriptive analysis method relying on the Worfian linguistic relativity framework is adopted here to capture the differences in phonemic transcriptions between Igbo correct spellings and Anglicized version of some wrongly spelt Igbo anthroponyms and toponyms. Data for this study were gotten from the five eastern states in Nigeria. Findings of the study reveal that Anglicized versions of the Igbo personal and place names are marred with mispronunciation, semantic ambiguities and distortion/total loss of the intended meanings of the investigated personal and place names. Moreover, the changing phenomenon is motivated by religion, westernization, wrong education, ignorance and urbanization. This undoubtedly has encouraged identity reconstruction among the Igbo people which poses threats to Igbo language development and a possible extinction of a living race. In view of these, the study therefore, recommends legislations in each of the state house of assembly to reconstruct all the misspelt personal and place names to reflect the true identity of ndi Igbo.