Language Use in the Kenyan Newspaper Sunday Nation

Abstract

This paper is the result of the study of language use in the Sunday Nation, a newspaper of the Nation Media Group, Nairobi, Kenya. Specifically, the paper was out to discover whether the Sunday Nation had a definable register, style, focusing on the level of language formality, and whether the newspaper had indigenised English. Fifty-three articles, including editorials and personal columns, from of the Sunday Nation were analysed. The articles, covering the period February to October 2003, were downloaded from the internet web page of the Media Nation Group. The study revealed that stock expressions, epithets, cliches, and special use of words, did indeed make up the register of the newspaper. It also revealed that the use of informal language permeated through editorials and personal columns. Informal words were not limited to any one category and the distribution between nouns, verbs and adjectives was found to be almost equal. Informal words occurred less frequently in the adverb category, at least in the data analysed. Indigenisation of English was clearly manifested in the text studied.