Conceptual metaphor analysis of Igbo youth language

New language varieties are evolving across the globe. One example of such varieties is youth language. This paper explores the youth language used by young people of Igbo in South-eastern Nigeria. The Igbo youth language is characterized by extensive use of metaphors. Young people utilize metaphors to express the mechanics of sexual activities and their gratifying appeal. They utilize lexically and contextually driven sexually explicit codes to conceptualize and reconstruct sex and sexual relations within their social universe and group’s dynamics. The study is rooted in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) which reveals that metaphor is a systematic cognitive device used in the understanding of certain abstract concepts through the application of concrete ones. The study establishes the existence of conceptual metaphors in the language of Igbo youth. The young people use sexual metaphors to structure their experience of women, men and sex in terms of status/objectification, dominance/power, possession/control and hostility/aggression. Introduction The study of metaphor has been one of the main research areas in Cognitive Linguistics. Within this framework metaphor is one basic imaginative cognitive mechanism. It is not a figure of speech, as it is considered by many traditional objectivist Linda Chinelo Nkamigbo 85 approaches (see for instance, Halliday 1985); not even the result of a wide array of contextual implications, as proposed by Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995; Papafragou 1996; Goatly 1997). Ibarretxe-Antunano (2001) notes that in Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor occupies a central role in thought and language. It is a means by which it is possible “to ground our conceptual systems experientially and to reason in a constrained but creative fashion” (Johnson 1992:351). Metaphor is defined as a “mapping” or “projection” between conceptual domains i.e. across different experiential domains (Lakoff 1993). In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduce a powerful theory for the study of the role of metaphor in our ordinary conceptual system. This theory has been developed by Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987), and Lakoff and Turner (1989), and followed, although not always in complete agreement, by many other authors such as Gibbs (1990,1992), Way (1991), Steen (1994), and Kovecses (2002), to mention only some. Lakoff and Johnson’s main concern is with why our everyday concepts are structured in one way rather than another. In particular, it is with conceptual metaphors, that is, conventional concepts elaborated metaphorically that may take public form in metaphoric expressions. But these metaphoric expressions, which represent these conventional metaphoric concepts, do not need to be interpreted metaphorically (Romero & Soria 2005). The purpose of this paper is to explore sexual metaphors as an aspect of the language of the young Igbo people. The paper examines the use of sexual metaphors by Igbo youth in Southeastern Nigeria. It investigates how youth utilize metaphors to express the mechanics of sexual activities and their gratifying Conceptual Metaphor Analysis of Igbo Youth Language 86 appeal. Young people utilize lexically and contextually driven sexually explicit codes to conceptualize and reconstruct sex and sexual relations within their social universe and group’s dynamics. The Igbo people occupy what is politically known as the southeastern part of Nigeria. The Igbo language is spoken in the core Igbo states Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo as well as in some parts of Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers states all in the southern region of Nigeria. The study concentrated on the Igbo youth residing in Onitsha. Onitsha is located in Anambra state, and it is one of the major commercial cities which attract the presence of people from various cultures across Nigeria, including Igbo speakers of different dialects. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section two gives a brief discussion on method of data collection and analysis; section three presents the theoretical framework adopted by this study; section four is devoted to the review of previous related works on metaphors; section five is the presentation of data; section six discusses the implications of the use of sexual metaphors while section seven presents some concluding remarks.