LANGUAGE USE IN ẸDO TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE CEREMONIES

The project discusses the traditional Ẹdo wedding ceremony among bilingual Ẹdo speaking families, with the following aims: (i) to throw more light on the discourse content and structure of the traditional Ẹdo wedding bilingual discourse; (ii) to identify the place of semiotics and signage in the wedding discourse. Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis provided the theoretical framework for the study while two recorded wedding transactions were used as empirical data. Moreover, participant observation by the author, a Ẹdo bilingual as well formed part of the research methodology. The findings show that: (i) a typical traditional Ẹdo wedding in the twenty-first century almost always involves Language Interlarding, since it is practically impossible to identify pure Ẹdo monolinguals at such weddings; (ii) Features of bilingualism are prevalent in the traditional Ẹdo wedding discourse; (iii) Ẹdo dialectal greetings or English greetings in their Ẹdo equivalents are rampant in the traditional Ẹdo wedding discourse;(iv) social semiotics – whether verbal or non-verbal - and signage, also feature prominently in this speech event; (vi) conclusively, Ẹdo traditional wedding is in itself, an evolving register with an ‘inner circle’ of users