Register Variation in Nigerian English Newspaper Editorials: A Comparative Study of Two National Dailies

Newspaper editorials constitute a distinct and influential register of written Nigerian English, combining argumentative discourse with varying degrees of formal and colloquial language use, and their linguistic characteristics reflect both the institutional norms of print journalism and the evolving conventions of Nigerian English. This study compares register features in editorials published by The Punch and The Daily Trust between January and June 2024, examining lexical density, sentence length, modality expression, and the use of Nigerian English lexical items. A corpus of sixty editorials, thirty from each newspaper, was assembled and analysed using corpus-assisted discourse methods alongside manual coding for register-specific features. Lexical density analysis shows that The Daily Trust editorials are marginally denser than those of The Punch, consistent with The Daily Trust's more formal editorial register targeting a northern Nigerian professional readership. Both newspapers show substantial use of epistemic modality in argumentative sections and deontic modality in recommendation sections, though the distribution differs in ways that reflect distinct editorial ideologies. Nigerian English lexical items including terms derived from Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo appear in both corpora, though more frequently in The Punch editorials, suggesting greater register latitude for vernacular lexicalization in that newspaper's house style. The study contributes to the growing descriptive literature on Nigerian English registers and has implications for journalism training programmes. Keywords: register variation, Nigerian English, newspaper editorials, corpus analysis, print journalism.