Prayer changes fate: language, Christian religious identity and the shifting socio-onomastic tradition in Erei personal names

This paper examines the changing pattern of personal names influenced by ideologies that construct Christian religious identity among Erei people in Cross River State, Nigeria. Using religious identity as conceptual framework, the study accounts for the emerging dimensions of Erei personal names based on motivations from Christian religious beliefs. Data were obtained by means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews involving 32 participants in a 9-month fieldwork. Findings show that colonialism and its Christian religion’s legacy have introduced a new socio-onomastic tradition among Erei people. The naming practice depicts a gradual departure from the crystallised traditional based personal names that express the people’s cosmology and African traditional religion’s worship to a naming culture nuanced in Christian religious ideologies and beliefs system. This conceptualisation produces a set of personal names that reconstruct Christian religious identity and ethnopragmatic representations of the Christian God. The personal names somehow utilised indigenous linguistic resources to rebuke idolatrous beliefs and venerate God as a supernatural being whose works and virtues are dependable, protective, impartial, compassionate, responsive, supreme and worthy of praise. This presents Erei people’s inseparable accessory to Christian religious practices that connect them with similar beliefs of other Christian adherents in Nigeria and beyond.