An Ethnolinguistic Study of Igbo Death and Burial Vocabulary in Oguta Communities, Imo State

This study conducts an ethnolinguistic investigation of death and burial vocabulary in Igbo as used in Oguta communities, Imo State, South East Nigeria. The lexical field surrounding death, dying, and mortuary rites in Igbo represents a culturally dense and symbolically layered domain that reveals deep cosmological beliefs about personhood, ancestry, the afterlife, and communal obligation. The study employs ethnographic fieldwork methods over a six-month period, collecting lexical data through structured elicitation interviews with thirty community elders, participation in three traditional burial ceremonies, and analysis of funeral orations. Linguistic analysis is framed within ethnosemantics and cultural linguistics traditions. Findings document a death vocabulary corpus of over two hundred and sixty distinct lexical items, categorised into eight semantic clusters: modes of dying, stages of mortuary preparation, categories of the bereaved, ancestral transition vocabulary, ritual functionaries, funeral musical terminology, spiritual sanction vocabulary, and post-burial social obligations. The study identifies significant metaphorical structuring in death vocabulary, with death conceptualised variously as a journey, a return, and a transformative elevation. Several documented terms have no equivalents in Standard Igbo dictionaries, constituting original lexical contributions. The research advocates for ethnolinguistic archiving as a dimension of cultural preservation policy. Keywords: Igbo ethnolinguistics, death vocabulary, burial rituals, Oguta, cultural semantics.