Functional Analysis of Igbo Idiomatic Expressions in the Novels of Flora Nwapa

This study conducts a functional analysis of Igbo idiomatic expressions as deployed in the novels of Flora Nwapa, widely regarded as the pioneering female voice in African fiction in English. Nwapa's narrative prose, particularly in Efuru and Idu, is characterised by a dense Igbo idiomatic texture that simultaneously serves aesthetic, cultural, and ideological functions. Despite Nwapa's foundational status in African literary studies, systematic linguistic attention to her idiomatic strategies remains limited. The research identifies and catalogues all Igbo idiomatic expressions in five of Nwapa's novels, translating, contextualising, and subjecting each to functional analysis within a pragma-stylistic framework. The identified corpus encompasses two hundred and nineteen idioms distributed across thematic domains of womanhood, communal obligation, fertility, spiritual life, and social conflict. Findings reveal that idioms perform three primary narrative functions in Nwapa's texts: authenticating cultural realism, encoding female subjectivity within patriarchal discourse, and mediating between Igbo-internal worldview and anglophone readership expectations. The study argues that Nwapa's idiomatic choices constitute a deliberate linguistic feminism embedded within apparent cultural traditionalism. Recommendations address the inclusion of Nwapa's linguistic strategies in university African literature syllabi. Keywords: Flora Nwapa, Igbo idioms, African fiction, functional linguistics, pragma-stylistics.