PRESERVING AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: THE CASE OF GUGBE IN BADAGRY, SOUTHWEST NIGERIA

Abstract

Endangered languages are languages usually ‘ignored’ by language policies and have, therefore, not fully benefitted from linguistic description and documentation of linguistic artefacts and local knowledge associated with them. The neglect makes the language prone to extinction as speakers reduce in population and dominant languages that pose as language predators overtake indigenous practices among users of the languages. This paper examines Gugbe in Badagry, South Western Nigeria. Gugbe is a Western Kwa language of the Niger-Congo language family (Comrie, 2003). Because of the presence of the dominant languages such as English and Yoruba, very little attention has been paid to the lexico-syntactic structures of proverbs in Gugbe. These proverbs have been found to communicate messages, knowledge or ideas in varied definable socio-cultural contexts that signal users of Gugbe as mother tongue as a people with discrete culture and identity. These proverbs are categorized according to social domains and analysed to discover the relationship between lexical choices and syntactic structures of their linguistic contexts. Apart from contributing to research in solving the problem of endangerment of the language and indigenous knowledge, this study will further stimulate interest in the description and development of Gugbe as an African language.