Rethinking Language, Arts and Culture in an Evolving Democracy

Abstract

Democracy has been acclaimed as the best form of government practicable. Its core essence is that the authority of the government is a trust, which is lost once the government becomes a danger to the governed. Power-elites in evolving democracies, especially Nigeria, a pivotal state, consisting of north and south political divides, generate conceptualisations, (i.e., language: arts and culture) for sustenance of inequality. Using the heterogeneous purposive sampling, 7 texts produced by power-elites of Nigeria are selected and subjected to critical discourse analysis (CDA). The core assumptions of CDA are: language is both the site for power struggle and the instrument for domination and inequality. The Muslim northern Nigeria power-elites coercively dominate access to political discourse. The marginalised southern participants should strategically rethink their language to gain access to political discourse in the evolving democracy.

Received: 5 December 2020 / Accepted: 21 January 2021 / Published: 5 March 2021