Aspects of Nativized English in Two Nigerian Sports Magazines and their Implications for Sports Reporting

Abstract

The indigenized features of the language of sports reporting and their significance for sports reporting constitute the focal point of this discourse. The socio-cultural and linguistic milieu in which the mass media operates often shapes the tools and modalities employed in the performance of its essential role of informing, educating, entertaining and persuading the audience. The creative adaptation of the English language to the Nigerian socio-cultural context in the communication of sporting activities, with particular reference to football in this case, has engendered the peculiar lexico-semantic and other structural features of the sports pages. This paper therefore sets out to examine some peculiar forms of nativized English in the selected sports magazines with a view to establish their role in the enhancement or impediment of sports communication.

Through a purposive sampling of three editions of the sports magazine, Complete Football Incorporated and its yearly review, Top 20, the content analysis revealed that such unique linguistic features as unconventional inflections, ambiguous mis-analogy, reduplication and redundancy, superfluous descriptive adjectives, misuse of grammatical items, ungrammatical forms and archaic forms characterize the sports pages. While a number of the categories may be considered as beneficial in the effective communication of sports events, others have negative implications for sports communication both nationally and internationally as they reduce intelligibility and ultimately impede effective communication. It is therefore suggested that for better employment and effectiveness of these nativised features, writers should use them in deducable linguistic contexts, avoid erroneous and ungrammatical forms, and make available supplementary information at strategic points in the report to aid readers' comprehension.