Developing football language in Yorùbá

Abstract

Football is a global sport; almost all cultures have catalogues of terms devised to designate its concepts. This study, which is a part of an on-going project by this researcher to develop “A metalanguage for football terms in Yorùbá” (one of the three major languages in Nigeria), seeks to describe strategies for designating football concepts in Yorùbá. Source language data were generated mainly from Dictionary – Inside UEFA – UEFA.com and translated using Newmark (1981) semantic and communicative translation strategies. The essence of the translation is to enable cognition of the terms in the target language. Existing Yorùbá terms for football concepts were generated from audio recordings of radio sports news presentations and dicourses and from football fans at football viewing centres with the aid of questionnaires. The researcher also relied on informants who are competent speakers of Yorùbá and are experts in football matters. These experts were helpful in making choices from the existing designations, and in offering alternative designations where existing terms are deemed inappropriate. The strategies employed for labeling football terms in Yorùbá include composition, idiomatisation, explication, loan translation, borrowing, use of existing equivalents, coinage, derivation, semantic extension, modulation, decentialisation and interlinguistic or hybrid formation. For the purpose of clinical cognition, these terms were categorised into native language creation, borrowing and interlinguistic based on linguistic sources of term creation. It is hoped that the study will significantly improve effective and efficient use of a football vocabulary in the study of the language.