LANGUAGE USE IN SOME CHURCHES IN ABA: A CASE STUDY OF THE RIVERSIDE SEVEVNTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH, ABA

Language is any means of communication by which information is passed across from a sender to a receiver. The means of communication, could be verbal, written or non-verbal and the use of any of its form is determined by the context of use. A major objective of this paper is: to examine the style of language use in some churches in Aba with a specific reference to the Riverside Seventh-Day Adventist church Aba. The theoretical framework under which this paper is carried out is Stylistics. The reason for this, is because it accounts for the elements of language used in conveying a certain subject matter. Data for this paper was collected by visiting the Riverside Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Aba, while a sermon was going on in the congregation in the adult section of the church. The library and the internet were also consulted for adequate conceptual review of studies in this aspect of sociolinguistic inquiry. Some of the findings in this paper are: that language use in churches in Aba is conditioned by the educational background of the audience in the church, that in a multilingual situation, that in the Riverside Seventh-Day Adventist church which represents a typology of language use in churches in Aba, code mixing and code switching are used for communicative effectiveness and as style to show the bilingual skill of the residents in Aba metropolis. This paper encourages further investigation on language use in other areas in Aba such as: the market, hospital, bus terminus and government offices.