‘I Will Marry by Force’: Female-Child Naming, and the Concept of ‘Home Names’ Among Bette-Obudu Women

Female-child naming represents a unique naming practice among women; yet, there are no current studies examining the interconnectedness between naming female children and gendering among married Bette-Obudu women. This study fills this gap in addition to exploring how Bette-Obudu women, southeastern Nigeria, use the names they assign to their daughters to dominate the “home space”. Ethnographic data were collected through semi-structured interviews from twenty-five purposively selected female-name-givers. Ethnolinguistic data of gendered names, within the Bette-Obudu anthroponomastic tradition, were investigated from the socio-onomastic perspective. This theory provides insights into the sociocultural and contextual meanings of names. The study aims to reveal that female-Bette names, such as Úbékpí (I will marry by force) and Ùngiéáwhúkyémá (The wife dominates her husband), among others, exemplify how mothers bestow names to their daughters to navigate patriarchal oppression and marginalisation, highlighting the concept of female space within the institution of marriage. Essentially, such names denote name-givers’ calculated effort to resist oppressive patriarchal regimes. This study increases understanding of how female-naming in the Bette-Obudu onomastics functions as an effectively subversive discourse against patriarchy by drawing scholars’ attention to the under-explored status of female-naming among Bette-Obudu women.