A SOCIO-ONOMASTICS STUDY OF THE CHARACTERS IN FIVE SELECTED MOVIES OF TUNDE KELANI

Abstract

Socio-onomastics takes into account the social, cultural, and situational domains in which names are used, and this applies to all kinds of names, place names, personal names, commercial names. Different studies have been carried out on onomastics of literary texts but inadequate scholarly attention has been paid on movies. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate socio-onomastics study of the characters in five selected movies of Tunde Kelani’s and provide detailed description of intended meaning by the means of linguistic tools in creating individual and collective identities as well as ideologies within Yoruba socio-cultural contexts. Stuart Hall’s (1978) Encoding and Decoding in Cultural studies with Kress and Leeuween (2000) Social semiotics and Homi K. Bhabha (1994) Cultural identity theory was adopted as theoretical framework. Data were sourced from the five selected movies. The data for the study were sourced from five movies of Tunde Kelani. The movies titles are Saworo Ide , Agogo Eewo, Koseegbe, The Narrow Path  and Dazzling Mirage. An interpretative and qualitative descriptive approach was used in doing the analysis. Names reflect cultural, historical, or social identities. They can signify ethnicity, religion, class, or family lineage, serving as markers of belonging or differentiation. It was found out that ninety-nine percent of names used by Tunde Kelani in his movies are from Yoruba socio-cultural milieu which depicts him as a tribalistic man. Tunde Kelani can be said to be religious biased because he used seven Islamic based names while he used one Christian name in all the movies. It is recommended that film producers, film makers should endeavor to choose names that will portray the characters they are trying to project. They should bear in mind that the pragmatic functions of names lie in their ability to efficiently facilitate communication while conveying social, cultural, and contextual meanings.