CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR ANALYSIS OFIGBO YOUTH IGBO YOUTH LANGUAGE

New language varieties are evolving across the globe. One example of such varieties is youth language. This paper explores the youth language used by young people of Igbo in South-eastern Nigeria. The Igbo youth language is characterized by extensive use of metaphors. Young people utilize metaphors to express the mechanics of sexual activities and their gratifying appeal. They utilize lexically and contextually driven sexually explicit codes to conceptualize and reconstruct sex and sexual relations within their social universe and group’s dynamics. The study is rooted in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) which reveals that metaphor is a systematic cognitive device used in the understanding of certain abstract concepts through the application of concrete ones. The study establishes the existence of conceptual metaphors in the language of Igbo youth. The young people use sexual metaphors to structure their experience of women, men and sex in terms of status/objectification, dominance/power, possession/control and hostility/aggression