Language and Social Inequality: The Igbo Woman Example
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Abstract
The Igbo ideological perspective encodes desires and rights that are relatively or discriminately shared among people of different status, roles and gender. This ideological perspective encodes the sayables and undoables in the language which disseminates and delegates power or rights across the social groups. The Igbo language harbors certain linguistic constraints that discriminate among social groups and as such create social inequality. The Igbo language is used to discriminate and marginalize the women folks. The gendered social organization of speech excludes women from certain speech events and speech genres. The paper investigates how the Igbo language has been used as a tool for social inequality and discrimination against female folks. It unveils the various linguistic forms used differently by different folks. The research adopts the deductive hypothetical theory. The qualitative method with in-depth interviews was used in data collection. The paper highlights the linguistic difference between the female speeches and the Male as evidence of social inequality. It was found that the speeches of Igbo women are usually gibberish, circumlocutory and ineffective as characterized by euphemism, slangy and politeness. The paper concludes that the Igbo language is loaded with linguistic constraints which disfavor the female folks. It recommends that Igbo women should be empowered linguistically by giving them access to all linguistic ingredients.