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A national anthem is an official song of a nation. Extant studies have examined national anthems from philosophical, thematic, and historical points of view with insufficient attention paid to the lexicalisation of discourse strategies in the anthems of African states. This study, therefore, investigates how lexical choices and discourse strategies are deployed in the construction of national identities and ideologies. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach were adopted as framework. Data were purposively selected from ideology-laden anthems, four from each of the five African sub-regions namely: Central (Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea); East (Djibouti, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Uganda); North (Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Tunisia); Southern (Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe); and West (Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, and Gambia). The study discovers that lexicalisation of discourse strategies of construction, transformation, perpetuation, and representation reflects socio-cultural, political, and cultural experiences of African states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant studies have investigated postproverbial expressions from sociological, feminist, and philosophical perspectives with insufficient attention paid to the linguistic representations of social identity in such expressions. This study, therefore, examines how social identities are constructed through postproverbials among Yoruba youths with a view to exploring the social realities that conditioned the representations of new identities in such expressions. The study adopts Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and Tajfel and Tuner's Social Identity Theory as framework. Ten (10) postproverbial expressions, which are from anonymous and the written collections of Yoruba proverbs by Yoruba scholars form the data. Linguistic substitutions and code-mixings characterise such expressions. Postproverbials are a conveyor of rationalist, religious, hedonistic, and economic identities, which are conditioned by western influence and are transported by the generation of conscious Yoruba youths. The paper inferred that, though proverbs and postproverbials are context-dependent, postproverbials explicate a paradigm shift in the postmodernist discourse and refract Nigerian socio-cultural realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]