DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2016.v04i01.008

Pages: 45-51

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. The current study examined the features of language that characterize reportage of football news in Kenyan newspapers. The study objective was to identify the interpretative structures employed in the language of football news reporting in Kenyan newspapers. The study employed Conceptual Metaphors theory, which asserts that metaphors are essential to human thought and communication process since they influence conceptual understandings of human beings. 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 judgmental sampling to identify and select thematically related articles from the two papers. Qualitative content analysis method that entailed identification, selection, coding and thematic categorization was used to analyze data. The results of this study reveal that there is extensive use of creative language in football news reporting in Kenya through allusion to normal day to day activities such as trade, human conversations and culture. The findings of this study therefore provide linguistic insight into the features that characterize football reporting in Kenyan newspapers.