A SOCIOLINGUISTICS ANALYSIS OF ADDRESS TERMS IN ISEKENSIS COMMUNITY

ABSTRACT

Address terms are a way to maintain people’s social structure. In addition to the fact that address terms are used as introduction in most speech events, that display some information about speech participants. This study focuses on the patterns and forms of address system in Isekenesis community, a minority ethnic linguistics group that live in parts of Imo State. The main objectives seeks to harness the various kinds of address terms used in Isekenesis community, elements that influences the choice of address terms used in a specific open circumstances. This study adopted a descriptive survey research design of a qualitative research methodology. Data were gathered via primary and secondary sources respectively. To achieve the aim of the study, the researcher used the tenets of the Speech Act theory as the theoretical approach. This study presented and discussed data from the language which shows the following address terms in the language: Kinship, Personal names, Titles, Love/Intimacy e.t.c. The concern of this research is on how the use of these address terms perform different functions in speech and help to maintain the social structure of the speech community. This study reveals that social factors like social status, family relationships, age of speech participants , degrees of intimacy and occupational hierarchy can affect the use of address terms in the Isekenesis community. However due to the paucity of literature in this dialect of study, the researcher recommends that further study on the dialect be carried out especially on the use of address terms and a sociolinguistics survey of language use in Isekenesis speech community.