The Representation of Women in Yoruba Proverbs: A Feminist Linguistic Critique

Proverbs encode and perpetuate social values, and their gendered dimensions reveal deeply embedded attitudes toward women within a speech community. This study examines the representation of women in Yoruba proverbs through a feminist linguistic critique, drawing on a corpus of 200 Yoruba proverbs collected from published proverb anthologies, interviews with elders, and oral performances in Osun, Oyo, and Ondo States, South West Nigeria. The study employs critical discourse analysis informed by feminist linguistics and gender ideology theory to classify and interpret gendered representations within the proverb corpus. Existing literature on gender and Yoruba language has addressed representation in folktales and praise poetry, with proverbs as a dedicated focus being comparatively limited in feminist linguistic scholarship. This study addresses that gap. The research classifies proverbs according to their representation of women as subjects, objects, moral agents, or social liabilities, and analyses the extent to which negative or limiting representations dominate the corpus. The study further investigates whether proverbs relating to women in leadership, wisdom, or spiritual authority exist in meaningful numbers alongside more restrictive representations. Findings are expected to reveal a complex corpus in which negative representations of women are more frequent but not exclusive, reflecting historical social tensions as well as examples of female agency. Recommendations will address the critical use of proverbs in gender-sensitive language education and the identification of positive gender representations for pedagogical deployment. Keywords: Yoruba proverbs, women's representation, feminist linguistics, gender ideology, oral tradition.