A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CODE-MIXING IN SELECTED SPEECHES OF FORMER GOVERNOR ABDULAZIZ YARI ABUBAKAR OF ZAMFARA STATE

Abstract

Speeches are written and delivered around the world every day and hour. Despite that, it has been observed that audiences complain about the way speakers use different styles and strategies when delivering their speeches. In a politics related communication process, for example, every speaker is believed to have what he wants to pass across to his audience. Meanwhile, when listeners are considered from their literacy level, it may be said that many of them (especially the illiterate ones) usually react differently to the speeches they listen to. When they are supposed to be sober after listening to a political figure’s speech, on many occasions, they praise the political figure instead. To sustain that kind of behaviour, political office holders make use of certain discursive strategies such as code-mixing. Against this backdrop, this research sets out to study elements of code-mixing in the selected speeches of former Governor Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar from the standpoint of Critical Discourse Analysis. To realise that, the work adopted Fairclough’s (1989) Discourse as a Social Practice as a theoretical framework. The data used for the critical analysis were three randomly selected speeches from twenty of the speeches that were delivered by the former Governor when he was in office. The speeches were collected from Zamfara State History Bureau and Legacy News Paper Company.  The extracted parts of each of the selected speeches were first presented before the analysis to indicate the various points where elements of code-mixing are located in the speech, using italics. Thereafter, the analysis of the collected data is presented on a table of three columns. The work confirms that code-mixing is one of the discursive strategies politicians use as instruments of manipulation in their speeches to win the supports of their audience.