A Socio-Morphophonemic Reading of Selected Nigerian Yoruba Hip-Hop Artists Stage Names.

Abstract: This study carried out the socio-morphophonemic analysis ofthe selected Nigerian Yoruba Hip-hop stage names with particular attention to their anglicised forms aimed at appealing to global audiences.With the view to carry out an indepth analysis, five purposively selected names were analysed using Optimality Theory as framework. Data were collected from Spotify and Apple Music which are publicly available music platforms. The Optimality Theory (OT) was employed to model the social interaction between the phonological constraints and morphological adaptations. Using a qualitative approach, both the original and the stage name of each artist was examined to underscore processes such as truncation, epenthesis, substitution, stress shift, and syllable restructuring. Findings revealed that markedness constraints dominated in producing socially-compatible English forms, often at the expense of Yoruba tonal and morphological integrity. This highlighted the interplay between linguistic structure and cultural identity, offering insights into the sociolinguistic implications of name adaptation in Nigeria’s globalized entertainment industry. The study therefore concludes that the anglicisation of NigerianYorubaHip-hop artist stage names involved a range of morphophonemic processes driven by the need to align with English phonotactics and thus recommends that there should be a standardisation of the anglicisation process of Yoruba Hip-hop artist stage names that ensures a correlation between the original indigenous names and their adapted forms in order to maintain the social cultural identity of the individual Yoruba Hip- hop artists.