The paper examines “Admonition” as one of the socio-cultural functions of Ndọkwa traditional oral funeral dirges. The objectives are to identify and offer explanation for the place of admonition in Ndọkwa traditional oral funeral dirges; and also discuss the three distinct types of admonition in same dirge-song-texts. The data used for this study consist of six dirge-songs, randomly selected from numerous Ndọkwa traditional oral funeral dirges that are drawn from five randomly selected villages in each of the three local administrative authorities that make up the geographical entity, called the Ndọkwa ethnic nationality, namely: Ụkwụani, Ndọkwa-West and Ndọkwa-East Local Government Areas, respectively. The necessary steps taken to conduct the study include the active participation of the researcher in burial proceedings, coupled with personal observation of cultural events, the recording of the randomly chosen traditional oral funeral dirges (i.e. the primary data), conduct of oral interviews and the subsequent transliteration and analysis of such data. The theoretical framework used for this study is The Functional Theory of Folklore, as enunciated by William Bascom in his text, Contributions to Folkloristic. The study finds that Ndọkwa traditional oral funeral dirges are enacted on occasions of mourning, for the purposes of, ‘admonition’ of the bereaved, the ‘admonition’ of the dead and the admonition eliciting uprightness in same dirge types, through the active use of relevant literary devices in appropriate contexts.
Keywords: Ndọkwa, Orality, dirges admonition, funeral
