Language of Football Reporting in Kenyan Newspapers

Abstract

Football game, as a social activity, plays a significant role in promoting the well being of the society. People engage in football games as a way of spending their leisure time, to boost individual health and at the professional level, as means of economic gain. The transformative growth and professionalism that football has undergone throughout the world has increasingly attracted the attention and interest of many people, becoming the leading global source of sports entertainment. Part of this entertainment accrues from the creative use of language used in the reporting of football. This study examined and analyzed the features of language that characterize reportage of football news in Kenyan newspapers. The study had two objectives; first, to identify the interpretative structures employed in the language of football news reporting in Kenyan newspapers and two; to describe the military and war imagery in the reporting of football news in Kenyan newspapers. The study employed Priming and Conceptual Metaphors theories as its theoretical frameworks. According to Conceptual Metaphor theory, metaphors are essential to human thought and communication process since they influence conceptual understandings of human beings; and they operate at the level of thinking where an individual uses one idea and links it to another to better understand something. The target population for the study was the four English media daily newspapers reporting on football news. A sample of two newspapers, The Daily Nation and The Standard was selected and thereafter the researcher used purposeful judgemental sampling to identify and select thematically related articles from the two papers. Since the interest of the study was on newspaper content, qualitative content analysis method which entailed identification, selection, coding and thematic categorization was used to analyse data. The results of this study reveal a wide range of interpretative features employed in the reporting of football news in Kenya including allusion to normal day to day activities such as trade, human conversations, culture, religion and animal characters. Military metaphors that correlate football to war and conflict are generously used to describe the football phenomenon. The findings of this study therefore provide linguistic insight into the features that characterize football reporting, thereby filling the knowledge gap in this area with regard to Kenyan context. The findings will provide insight to media and language students in institutions of higher learning interested in analysis of football language as reported in media agencies.