In the past almost every speech community cherished and used proverbs in speech acts. Chinua Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart that in Nigeria, proverb was the oil with which words were eaten. It has been observed over the past five years that the use of proverbs to embellish speech is becoming a thing of the past in Ghanaian speech communities. A preliminary investigation revealed that the generation thinks proverbs reveal the experiencing of the old people in the past and therefore no longer relevant for the contemporary world. Have you noticed a similar downward trend in the use of proverbs in your speech community? If yes, what should account for this trend in your speech community?
Sociolinguistics, linguistics, literature, anthropology