A wordlist of Abureni on illnesses, diseases, and global pandemics

The Abureni language is spoken along the southern borders of Bayelsa and Rivers States of Nigeria. It has names of common illnesses, diseases, and global pandemics that its people had suffered in the past, but they are not documented in any extant literature. The objective of this article is to address the identified gap by providing a wordlist on the diseases and illnesses in the Abureni language. The main tool for data elicitation was Roberts & Snider (2006)’s SIL Comparative African Wordlist (SILCAWL), from which illness and disease-related words were drawn and expanded. The data were presented in different linguistic domains and reviewed with selected native speakers, especially medical professionals. The author notes that during a global pandemic, native speakers used new language and interplay of words to describe the illness or disease that was prevalent. The interplay with words became more pronounced for novel diseases than for known types of diseases. It is anticipated that the results from this study will serve as resources to an Abureni wordlist or dictionary, thus minimizing the dearth of literature on Abureni disease names.