Language and Gender in Political Debates: A Study of Female Legislators in the National Assembly

The intersection of language, gender, and political power has generated substantial research globally, yet the specific linguistic strategies deployed by female Nigerian legislators in formal parliamentary debate remain inadequately documented. This study examines the language use patterns of female members of the National Assembly in selected plenary session debates between 2022 and 2024, focusing on interruptive behaviour, hedging frequency, and assertiveness markers in transcribed floor debate contributions. A corpus of transcribed floor contributions from twenty female and twenty male legislators drawn from the Senate and House of Representatives was assembled from the National Assembly Hansard archive and subjected to quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis. Hedging frequency was measured using a standardized hedge inventory, while interruption coding followed a modified Jefferson scheme. Contrary to earlier deficit model predictions, female legislators in the corpus do not show significantly higher hedging frequencies than male counterparts, though they do differ in the types of hedge used, deploying more epistemic hedges and fewer approximators. Interruption analysis shows that female legislators are interrupted more frequently than they interrupt others, a pattern consistent with gendered floor control documented in other legislative corpora. The study situates these findings within recent third-wave feminist linguistics, arguing that gender effects in this context are better understood as institutional positioning effects than as inherent gender-language differences. Keywords: language and gender, political debate, National Assembly, female legislators, parliamentary discourse.