Discourse Analysis of French Language Use in Nigerian Television Advertising

The use of French in Nigerian television advertising constitutes a semiotic choice that encodes aspirations, cultural associations, and target audience positioning, reflecting broader patterns of French prestige in the Nigerian consumer imagination. This study analyses the discourse functions and linguistic features of French language use in Nigerian television advertisements broadcast on channels accessible to mass audiences. A critical discourse analysis and multimodal semiotics framework was applied to a corpus of 85 television advertisements collected between 2022 and 2024, in which French words, phrases, or full sentences appeared. Advertisements were classified by product category, target demographic, and function of French within the advertisement, with linguistic analysis of phonological, lexical, and syntactic features. Results show that French appears most frequently in advertisements for luxury consumer goods, premium banking products, fashion and beauty brands, and international food and beverage products. French functions primarily as a prestige register signal rather than as a communicative medium, with single words or short phrases embedded in English-dominant discourse performing the majority of French instances. French phonological features, particularly the trilled /r/, were simulated in voice-over performances even when lexical content was minimal, suggesting that French phonology itself carries indexical prestige value. Advertisements targeting younger urban demographics in Lagos and Abuja showed higher French lexical density than those targeting mass market audiences. The study contributes to the analysis of French as a prestige indexical in Nigerian commercial discourse. Keywords: discourse analysis, French language, television advertising, Nigeria, prestige indexing