The Diminution of the Samaritan in the Bokyi Jesus Film: A Plus or a Minus for Effective Communication?

The Jesus Film has been a blessing to many language communities around the world. The same is true of language communities in Nigeria, including Bokyi, the researcher’s mother tongue. This paper investigates a strategy that was adopted by the script writers of the Jesus Film in Bokyi language – the diminution of the Samaritan in Luke 10:33. This was done through the use of the Bokyi diminutive morpheme, kaa, to describe the Samaritan instead of the normal noun class agreement morpheme, o. The paper adopts a form and function approach in the analysis of the Bokyi diminutive. First, the forms of the diminutives are identified. Secondly, the functions of the identified forms are highlighted. Thirdly, the paper examines how the diminutive morpheme is used in the Luke passage and shows how this is slightly different from what is on the printed Bible. The study reveals that, while the Bokyi diminutive morpheme has something to do with the size of the referent, it also performs other semantic and pragmatic functions, as could be seen in the passage under study. The paper also shows that while the use of the diminutive helped the Bokyi translation team to achieve some of its objectives, the strategy has some attendant implicit challenges that should not be ignored.
Keywords: Jesus Film, diminutive, Bokyi, semantics, pragmatics, morpheme, Samaritan, effective communication