Sweetheart, Kay, Babe, and My Dear: A Sociopragmatic Study of Address Terms among Educated Ghanaian Couples

Abstract

The intricacies of communication within intimate relationships, including the choice of address terms, are influenced by various factors. Although address terms are commonplace in various interactive encounters, they remain under-researched in spousal interactions. This study, therefore, investigated address terms used among educated Ghanaian couples across different social contexts in the Cape Coast Metropolis (Ghana), utilising Brown and Gilman’s (1960) Theory of Power and Solidarity Postulates. The data for this study were collected through a written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) administered to some willing and available married close friends. Three key findings emerged from the analysis. First, educated Ghanaian couples in Cape Coast Metropolis commonly employed six major address terms in their face-to-face interactions, which include endearment terms, first names, clipped first names, descriptive phrases, titles/honorifics, and zero address terms. Second, the choice of address terms by educated couples ishighly context-dependent, as they primarily consider the interaction setting before choosing a particular address form. Lastly, couples exhibit creativity and innovation in their choice of address terms to reinforce mutual communication and maintain intimacy and affection. These findings contribute to the sociolinguistic scholarship on familial address practices in multilingual Ghanaian contexts and offer implications for cultural maintenance, marriage communication, and future research on non-educated couples in Ghana.