A Linguistic Survey of Types of Names among the Babukusu of Kenya

It is the society that gives names and so they determine what a person, place or thing be named. This paper seeks to explain types of names among the Babukusu of Kenya within a linguistic context. It uses an inflectional or derivational approach to describe the pattern of the names. We discovered that the types of names namely, personal names, place names and names of things and tools have some form of morphological pattern. There is what we refer to as ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ type of names. Kibukusu personal male and female names have prefixes to differentiate gender but share the same root word. This we have referred to as indirect reference of naming in some instances. Where there is a direct reference of naming, the names do not have prefixes because they are names that refer to other things, but are also used for persons. We observe that place names share the same features of personal names. Names for things and tools have been taken from Kiswahili and bukusulized in other words; the names are made to look Kibukusu words.