A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU'S 2026 NEW YEAR SPEECH
Keywords:
New Year, Speech, Politeness, Speech Act, DeixisAbstract
The New Year speech serves as a significant rhetorical event in national discourse, offering presidents the opportunity to address citizens, reflect on past achievements, and outline future aspirations. This study presents a pragmatic analysis of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's 2026 New Year speech, examining how language is strategically employed to achieve specific communicative goals. The study was guided by three objectives and three research questions. The qualitative research design was utilised for the study, specifically content analysis. The sample comprised the complete text of President Tinubu's 2026 New Year speech, delivered on January 1, 2026. The sampling technique utilised for the study was purposive sampling, focusing on this particular speech due to its significance as a major national address. The instrument was found to be reliable through intercoder reliability, where several researchers were found to have used similar instruments to analyse political speeches. The method of data analysis was thematic, where various pragmatic features were analysed based on established pragmatic frameworks. The findings of the study revealed that President Tinubu employs a range of speech acts, with assertives and directives being the most prominent, serving to inform citizens about achievements and guide them toward desired actions. The politeness strategies identified include positive politeness through inclusive language such as "Fellow Nigerians" and "our," as well as negative politeness through hedged expressions that respect citizens' autonomy. The deixis analysis revealed strategic use of personal, temporal, and spatial deictic expressions to create proximity, establish authority, and situate achievements within a coherent temporal framework. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended among others that political speechwriters should maintain the strategic use of inclusive pronouns to foster national unity, and that pragmatic analysis should be incorporated into media literacy programmes to enhance citizens' critical understanding of political discourse. Recommendations for further study were also made. The study concluded that President Tinubu's 2026 New Year speech demonstrates sophisticated pragmatic awareness, employing language strategically to project competence, foster unity, and inspire collective action toward national development goals.
References
Ademilokun, M. (2016). Rhetorical strategies in Nigerian presidential debates. Journal of African Elections, 15(2), 89-108.
Adetunji, A. (2006). A pragmatic analysis of Nigerian presidential inaugural speeches. Papers in English Linguistics, 7(1), 45-67.
Ajayi, T. M. (2018). Rhetorical strategies in Nigerian presidential budget speeches. Lagos Papers in English Studies, 9(2), 112-134.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Babatunde, S. T., & Odepidan, O. (2019). Discourse strategies in Nigerian presidential inaugural speeches. Ibadan Journal of English Studies, 12(1), 78-102.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.
Chilton, P., & Schäffner, C. (2002). Introduction: Themes and principles in the analysis of political discourse. In P. Chilton & C. Schäffner (Eds.), Politics as text and talk: Analytic approaches to political discourse (pp. 1-41). John Benjamins.
Crystal, D. (2008). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (6th ed.). Blackwell.
Fairclough, N. (2000). New Labour, new language? Routledge.
Fillmore, C. J. (1997). Lectures on deixis. CSLI Publications.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. Anchor Books.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41-58). Academic Press.
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Mey, J. L. (2001). Pragmatics: An introduction (2nd ed.). Blackwell.
Oha, O. (2010). The discourse of Nigerian presidential broadcasts during national emergencies. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 22(1), 45-62.
Oyebode, O., & Unuabonah, F. (2018). Pragmatic acts in Nigerian State of the State addresses. Language Matters, 49(3), 24-44.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1-23.
Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics. Longman.
van Dijk, T. A. (1997). What is political discourse analysis? Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 11(1), 11-52.
Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, adaptation, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors are permitted to post their work online in institutional/disciplinary repositories or on their own websites. Pre-print versions posted online should include a citation and link to the final published version in Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication as soon as the issue is available; post-print versions (including the final publisher's PDF) should include a citation and link to the journal's website.
