A Linguistic Study of Women’s Hairstyle Names

Abstract

The main focus of the study was to investigate on women’s hairstyle names in Kinondoni Municipal Council, which is found in Dar es Salaam region, Tanzania. This paper focuses on two specific objectives, namely to identify women’s hairstyle names and to find out the structural patterns of women’s hairstyle names. The study is a qualitative study guided by onomastic theory of naming and morpheme-based theory. The study employed descriptive research designs. Semi-structured interview and observation methods were used to collect data, where 16 respondents who were obtained through snowball and convenience sampling techniques. The findings reveal that, women’s hairstyles have meanings which are either denotative or connotative or both. They are derived from different sources such as insects, number, appearance, parts of human body, animal body parts, flora, insecticides, land forms, social events and names of famous people. Therefore, women’s hairstyle names in Kinondoni are deliberately created, not accidentally constructed. Moreover, women’s hairstyle names in Kinondoni Municipality possess morphological and syntactic patterns. Under morphological structure, women’s hairstyle names are in free morphemes, affixation, compounding and reduplication. Syntactically, women’s hairstyle names have noun phrases and sentential structures. In relation to the data from the field, the paper concludes that there is no rigidity on women’s hairstyle names compared to other kinds of names such as personal names. This is because women’s hairstyle names are replaced or used interchangeably with other hairstyle names which mean the same.