Proverbs and the Preservation of Yorùbá Language and Cultural Values in Nollywood Movies.

Yorùbá language, with its strong linguistic and cultural impacts in Africa and the Americas, faces imminent extinction, especially in Nigeria, where it counts the biggest number of speakers. It is no gainsaying then that Nollywood's production of historical classics in undiluted Nigerian Yorùbá language is playing the nationalist roles of rescuing and preserving the rich but threatened Yorùbá language and its culture. One of the ways Nollywood does that is through the use of witticism, especially, proverbs. The present paper analyzes some Yorùbá Nollywood canonic films and illustrates how their directors make use of strictly scripted films in Yorùbá language to preserve the authenticity of the language and bring to the fore many centuries of the ancient civilization of the Yorubas. Through a paremiological analysis of the richly coded Yorùbá language in the films, our arguments lay bare the meanings, the functions and the importance of proverbs in the oratory skills of the Yorubas. The analysis allows for a deep understanding of the ethnographical study of the values of the Yorubas in their various aspects of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]