Linguistic Strategies that Imply Gender Inequality in Yoruba Proverbs and Postproverbials

There are linguistic elements in Yoruba proverbs that reveal oppression of women. Previous studies have suggested reconstruction of these proverbs to remove the elements that suggest oppression of women. In doing so, some of them succeed in creating elements that mean discrimination and oppression against/of men. This paper posits that this is replacing an evil with another evil, which does not seem to provide solution expected of a research. This paper therefore investigates these linguistic elements and reconstruct them in a way that oppression of the two genders is abolished. The paper uses secondary data. Nineteen proverbs in Balogun (2010), out of which of some are reconstructed,serve as the data for this paper. The paper adopts Postmodern theory.This paper finds out that the proverbs mainly use negative nouns and adjectives, feminine words and positive verbal expressions to achieve discrimination against women. The postproverbials derived from some of the proverbs extend some of these linguistic elements to men folk to achieve balance. This paper uses the opposite of these linguistic strategies and elimination/replacement of some in the reconstruction of the proverbs to eliminate oppression of/ discrimination against any of the two genders. It recommends that researchers should not only reconstruct proverbs they feel undermine dignity of women or humanity but also begin to question their reconstructions to ensure that more damages are not caused. Keywords: Linguistic strategies, Gender Inequality, Postproverbials, Proverbs