The Jargon of the Palm Wine Drinkers' (Kegite) Club at Abia State University, Uturu: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

This study examines the specialised lexical repertoire of the Kegite (Palm Wine Drinkers') Club at Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria. The study draws on participant observation and oral interviews with purposively selected fully initiated members, whose familiarity with club practices made them appropriate sources for documenting in-group vocabulary. The presented corpus contains 89 listed entries organised into four functional categories: 30 officer titles, 16 branch labels, 17 activity-related expressions, and 26 other recurrent terms. The analysis is descriptive and sociolinguistic, focusing on contextual meaning, semantic specialisation, metaphorical extension, lexical creativity, and observable multilingual influence. Communication Accommodation Theory is used cautiously as an interpretive framework for understanding how a shared repertoire may support in-group alignment and social differentiation; the study does not treat lexical difference alone as direct behavioural proof of accommodation. The corpus shows that familiar English forms are frequently assigned specialised meanings, while some expressions display borrowing or stylised forms associated with Nigeria's multilingual campus environment. Items such as World Bank/CBN, poison, off frequency, and disobey the law of gravity illustrate semantic reanalysis and metaphor, whereas Ilya functions as a conventional branch label within the club. Overall, the repertoire operates as a resource for communicative economy, shared identity, and contextual intelligibility among initiated members. Because the data are drawn from a single institutional setting, the findings are restricted to the documented ABSU corpus and are not generalised to all Kegite branches.