Semantic Shifts in Igbo Political Vocabulary: A Study of Campaign Discourse in the 2023 Gubernatorial Elections in Ebonyi State

This study analyses semantic shifts in Igbo political vocabulary as deployed in campaign discourse during the 2023 gubernatorial elections in Ebonyi State, South East Nigeria. Political language is a dynamic register in which words acquire specialised, contested, and sometimes deliberately distorted meanings to serve partisan persuasion strategies. Igbo political speech represents an underexplored domain in the broader study of political linguistics in Nigeria. The research collects its primary corpus from transcribed campaign rally speeches, political jingles, and street-level oral campaign materials recorded across four local government areas in Ebonyi State during the campaign period. Semantic analysis is conducted using a lexical pragmatics framework, focusing on semantic broadening, narrowing, amelioration, and pejoration processes. Findings reveal that abstract governance terms such as development, unity, and community have undergone significant contextual narrowing in campaign usage, serving primarily to encode ethnic solidarity rather than policy substance. The study also documents the emergence of seventeen novel political coinages in campaign Igbo that do not appear in standard dictionaries, reflecting the creative adaptability of the language in public life. Recommendations address the need for media literacy education to help voters decode politically charged linguistic framing. Keywords: semantic shift, Igbo political language, campaign discourse, Ebonyi State, political linguistics.