Strategies used by youth presenters in local entertainment programmes to create identities in Kenyan media

Abstract

The study sought to establish how youth presenters on local entertainment programmes in Kenyan media use language to create identities among themselves and their viewers. While media personalities carry on their social interactions, the viewers and listeners are using the media as an active component of the construction of their own interactions and identities. The study set out to establish how the youth presenters on local entertainment programmes use language to create identities among their viewers and listeners and to highlight the type of content the youth presenters present on selected youth programmes. Using observation and recording as the main tools of data collection, a corpus of four programmes (two radio programmes and two TV programmes) were purposively sampled, observed by the researcher, transcribed, coded, and then thematically analysed. Guided by Wodak's Discourse Historical Approach and Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame theory that provided the framework for analysis, the study adopted a descriptive research design. The research design provided insights into the characteristics of youth language that indicated identity creation in the programmes under study. The findings of this study revealed that some of the features of youth language that are used to create identity are code-mixing, code-switching, Shembeteng, slang, borrowing, Sheng and short forms, which are also the hallmarks of youth language. The findings of the study contribute to new knowledge in terms of language evolution among the youth.