Pragmatic Acts in Nigerian Pidgin Football Commentary

Abstract

Nigerian Pidgin (NP) football commentary serves as a dynamic platform for engaging diverse audiences, yet its pragmatic mechanisms remain under-explored. This study addresses this gap by applying Jacob Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts Theory to examine pragmatic acts (practs) and their contextual variations (allopracts) in NP commentary. Through qualitative discourse analysis of ten purposively sampled match-event composites from Nigerian national teams, clubs, or players, the study covers the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), the 2023–2024 Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL), and selected 2025 fixtures. It investigates how commentators deploy practs such as praising, criticizing, encouraging, and predicting within micro-, meso-, and macro-pragmemes. The objectives are threefold: to categorise common practs and allopracts in NP commentary, to examine how these acts reflect culturally and situationally driven pragmemes, and to assess how these pragmatic strategies foster inclusivity and emotional connection in Nigeria’s multilingual media landscape. Findings reveal that NP commentary systematically layers pragmatic acts to narrate events, entertain, critique, and affirm cultural identity, demonstrating the language’s adaptability, immediacy, and expressive depth. The study contributes a novel linguistic perspective to sports discourse research and offers practical implications for broadcaster training, showing that leveraging NP’s pragmatic richness can enhance audience engagement and validate its professional status in Nigerian sports broadcasting.