Defamiliarising Names: A Socio-stylistic Analysis of Selected Anglicised Yoruba Anthroponyms on Facebook

Abstract

The Yoruba, one of West Africa’s largest ethnic groups, possess a semantically rich naming system in which anthroponyms function as communicative tools that encode destiny, circumstances of birth, aspirations, spirituality, and social status. These transparent phrase-like names on social media platforms undergo systematic morpho-phonological and orthographic transformations to align with English conventions, resulting in hybrid forms that become estranged to both Yoruba speakers and non-Yoruba audiences. This study investigated defamiliarisation strategies in selected Anglicised Yoruba personal names on Facebook, a prominent platform for digital identity performance among Yoruba English bilinguals. Employing a qualitative descriptive approach and Shklovsky (1965), we analysed fifty Anglicised variants randomly sampled from Facebook (ten Yoruba names with five variants each). Defamiliarisation was achieved primarily through orthographic and phonetic reshaping, as well as morphological segmentation and combination. Orthographic and phonetic reshaping took the form of consonant insertion, vowel elongation and digraph insertion while morphological segmentation and combination appeared as affixation, fragmentation and reduction. These alterations obscured original meaning, introduced non-Yoruba clusters and aspiration and created perceptual difficulty, thereby prolonging engagement with the name(s) as a constructed hybrid sign. The findings revealed Anglicisation as a multifaceted phenomenon which is linguistically innovative, culturally hybrid, and sociologically strategic. It reflected postcolonial language contact, global English hegemony, youth exuberance, and the desire for digital legibility and cosmopolitan appeal, yet risked eroding Yoruba semantic transparency and cultural authenticity. Ultimately, this research extended defamiliarisation beyond literary aesthetics into spontaneous, user driven sociolinguistic practice on social media. It highlighted how everyday orthographic creativity served identity negotiation in transcultural digital environments while raising implications for language preservation and pedagogy in postcolonial multilingual contexts. Thus, Anglicisation is not merely a phonetic simplification or assimilation but a deliberate process of estrangement that negotiates transcultural identity in an English-dominant global digital space.