Individual Names With Tiv People From Nigeria And Cameroon

This article focuses mainly on individual names given at birth and by which people are ordinarily named with Tiv people from Nigeria and Cameroon. Many change factors punctuate their attribution and offer some typological bundles to be put in relation with practices that have been observed on others communities mostly those related to God and death, to fauna. Individual names are a linguistic reality since they express verbal messages whose signs are those of daily language practices. They are also a social reality because they are place of cultural expression in their genesis and their content. They convey relationships network in which individual socially defines himself. The first scientific interest of this work is that, going from the knowledge of the change factors that rule individual names attribution, we come to review classical historiography of African linguistic communities in general and Tiv people in particular.