JOSUGA: JOS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

This work examines the intersection of language, culture, and ecological knowledge in the naming of medicinal plants in four major Nigerian ethnolinguistic groups: Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Fulani. With a set of 39 indigenous herb names, this study demonstrates how naming practice carry encoded, functional, ecological, aesthetic, and symbolic as well as spiritual information. Grounded in Relevance Theory and principles in Ethnobotanical Linguistics, we explored how plant names function as communicative acts within cultural settings. The data were analysed qualitatively through thematic coding and quantitatively through a Chi-Square Test of Independence. Symbolic and spiritual naming dominated the naming practices of the Igbo and Yoruba speakers, functional descriptors were heavily favoured in Hausa naming, and ecological contexts were markedly included in the Fulani naming. Overall, these results demonstrate that plant nomenclature in African communities serve not only as socio-historical and ecological markers, but also as epistemological indicators that assist in the worldviews it embodies in framing reasons for spiritual and environmental interactions. Further, the research supports the growing literature on the potential benefits of indigenous knowledge systems and that language roots serve as primary agents of ethnomedical knowledge transmission. 

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