An Exploration of Gender System in Igbo Language

Abstract

Igbo language belongs to the Igbo sub-group within Benue-kwa in the new west Benue Congo (Williamson & Blench, 2000). It is chiefly spoken in the South-Eastern geo-political zone of Nigeria. In the natural languages, the notion of gender is expressed, but there exist various ways by which each language expresses it in its particular grammar. In linguistics, grammatical gender systems as well as natural gender system exist. This paper explores gender system in Igbo Language and strategies the Language employs in expressing it in the syntactic constructions. The study employs the random sampling technique to select the population used in this study. The data were obtained through the oral interviews and also through recording of the speech of the Igbo native speakers. The paper adopts a descriptive method in the analysis of the data. The findings of the work show that Igbo language lacks grammatical gender system but there exist natural gender system which is based on the biological sex. The language does not have any overt morphological marker for expressing the notion of gender. In the language, some nouns have defined names which indicate their gender while those that do not have defined names for their gender, certain qualifying words are employed to indicate their gender. These qualifying words are free morphemes such as óké (male), nwunye (female), nwoke (male) and nwanyi (woman/female). The word óké is always in a high tone. These words have their specific positions in the syntactic structures respectively. óké and nwunye always precede the nouns immediately while nwoke and nwaanyi can occur before or after the noun. The language also expresses gender notion using traditional proper names such as Okafo, Mgbafo, Okeke and Mgbeke. Igbo pronouns, adjectives and determiners do not indicate gender in any form as in French, German and Latin.