Paper long abstract:

Aspects of colonial language influence on the African linguistic landscape will not only be found in general usage, but also in the philosophical aesthetic sphere, where receding knowledge of indigenous language forms has led to the emergence of alien new forms. An example is the emergence of variants of traditional proverbs. The perceived misuse of the proverbs often generates resistance within the indigenous populations. The emergence of such variants of old traditional Yoruba proverbs in Nigeria, and such resistance, has been well established (Oloruntoba-Oju, 1997; Raji-Oyelade, 1997). Despite the extensive continuous use of these new proverbial forms in conversations and in aesthetic forms such as Nigerian literary texts and movies, many academics have not accepted these new forms and terms such as disruption, banality, blasphemy and rupture have been used to describe them. They are viewed as disruption or corruption of the traditional form and the philosophical import embedded in the traditional Yoruba proverbs. The aim of this paper is to examine the employment of both old (traditional) and new proverbial forms in the selected Yoruba movies, where the new forms also flourish, and in the light of academic attitudes towards variants of indigenous forms. The paper employs Oloruntoba-Ojus (1997) model, which classifies the new forms as a kind of paralanguage and subdivides variants of the original traditional proverbs into the counterproverbial, the metaproverbial and the pseudoproverbial. It also takes cognizance of the description of the latter as postproverbials (Raji-Oyelade, 1997). Using the movies of Tunde Kelani and Babatunde Omidina as exemplars, the paper acknowledges that it is not all the new proverbial forms that indicate a disruption of the philosophical import of the old proverbial forms. The paper therefore weighs in on the arguments for and against the continued employment of these new forms and their acceptance or integration within formal institutions.

Keywords: traditional Yoruba proverbs, Yoruba movies, counterproverbial, metaproverbial, pseudoproverbial, postproverbials