Igbo Personal Naming Practices and Socio-Cultural Meanings in Port Harcourt, Rivers State

This study investigates Igbo personal naming practices and the socio-cultural meanings encoded in personal names among Igbo communities in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, South South Nigeria. Personal names in Igbo culture are not merely identificatory labels but complex socio-cultural statements reflecting family circumstances, spiritual beliefs, communal values, and historical experiences at the time of birth. The increasing cultural hybridity in Port Harcourt's cosmopolitan environment raises questions about continuity and transformation in Igbo naming traditions. The study collects data through structured interviews with fifty Igbo parents and grandparents, supplemented by a lexical-semantic analysis of three hundred personal names obtained from church naming ceremony registers in three parishes. Findings reveal that theophoric names invoking Chukwu and Chi remain the most prevalent category, accounting for approximately forty-five percent of the corpus. A growing subset of names, approximately eighteen percent, reflects English and hybrid constructions, particularly among families with higher educational attainment. Circumstances of birth, including difficult pregnancies, family losses, and economic adversity, continue to be the primary drivers of name selection across all socio-economic groups studied. The research contributes to onomastic studies in Nigerian linguistics and highlights the urgency of archiving naming traditions that are becoming less transparent to younger generations. Keywords: Igbo personal names, onomastics, socio-cultural meaning, Port Harcourt, naming tradition.