The Morphological Analysis of Zulu Clan Names

Abstract

The focus of this paper is that some scholars and people are not aware of the morphological structure of Zulu clan names. The clan names in themselves cipher secreted information that would be a story, history, a very long story perhaps which talks about the people of that clan, it could be Kings, famous people or a whole family. The main aim of the paper is to make people aware of the morphological structure of Zulu clan names. Research findings indicate that there is morphological structure in Zulu clan names that most scholars and Zulu people are not aware of. This study found that the structure of a clan name and its meaning are related. An example of such a clan name is Hlabangane (slaughter four); [Hlaba (slaughter) + nga (per) + -ne (four)], which indicates that the clan name giver saw people of this clan slaughtering four cows when they had traditional ceremonies. However, through the use of this clan name, the clan name giver appears as a person who experienced or observed Hlabangane people repeating the same procedure several times and no one disagreed with him because it was a fact. The researcher have used document analysis and in depth personal interviews to gather data for this paper.