Acceso usuarios
Samson Nzuanke
The Ubang language in Obudu, Southeastern Nigeria, is asymmetric because com-munication among males and females or between them flows through two distinct lin-guistic codes. This phenomenon tends to challenge the nature of occurrence and use of language(s) in any given community. Is it a natural or a societal phenomenon? How does such intergender communication occur? To seek responses to these questions, this study sets out to interrogate the nature of male-female discourse in Ubang by observing 18 Ubang language speakers (nine males and nine females) in naturally occurring commu-nication in their physical environment and analyzing their conversations using Peircean semiotics, the interpretative theory of translation and Susan Petrilli’s (2003) tripod of intralingual translation. It was discovered that male-female communication in Ubang is more a function of intralingual translation.
