Political Discourse Analysis: A Case Study of Code Mixing and Code Switching in Political Speeches (2021)

Abstract: Political discourse is one of the most interesting data to study power relations in the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. With the increase in the modes of textual and spoken forms of communication, politicians use language and linguistic mechanisms that contribute significantly in building their relationship with people, especially in a multilingual country like India with many political parties with different ideologies. This paper analyses code-mixing and code-switching in Telugu political speeches to determine the factors responsible for their usage levels in various social settings and communicative contexts. We also compile a detailed set of rules capturing dialectal variations between Standard and Telangana dialects of Telugu.

## observations and results after annotating based on these guidelines, the results are tabulated as follows. in communicative event 1, as they were addressing telangana residents, relatively higher levels of telangana dialect are observed in speeches by both the speakers to get more connection with the audience. however, kcr has used more telangana dialect in his speech than cbn. kcr was fighting for a separate telangana state. cbn speech was during the telangana elections in 2018. his ideology doesn't align with kcr. in addition to connection with the audience, ideologies of the speaker also impact the levels of code-mixing and code-switching. kcr also uses high levels of codeswitching in hindi for establishing a better connection with the audience as the telangana dialect is influenced by hindi/urdu. in communicative event 2, kcn and cbn addressed mlas and other parliament members of telangana and andhra pradesh. in cbn's speech, the usage of mst can be due to the absence of telangana residents. however, in kcr speech, most of them are telangana residents, yet lesser levels of telangana dialect are observed. so, context of the speech also determines the levels of codemixing and code-switching. in this communicative event, as they were addressing a national topic, mst, lesser language level code-mixing and lower code-switching levels are observed. in communicative event 3, english usage is high in both speeches than other speeches as the meeting is about capitals and all government officials may not be aware of the local language. in kcr speech, local politicians are also part of the meeting, so telangana dialect usage is prominent. whereas in cbn speech, very high levels of english is used as the meeting is only with collectors. ## conclusions and future work in this paper, we looked at the phenomenon of cm/cs between dialects of telugu, mst and languages like english and hindi/urdu for different communicative contexts. the audience, ideologies of the speaker and context of the speech impacted the speakers linguistic choices. our transcribed and annotated speeches foot_0 can be further be used to develop dialectal speech recognition systems.we present a very detailed set of observations and annotation guidelines to capture the dialectal variations between the mst and telangana dialect of telugu. these could be studied and extended to handle dialectal variations in other languages, especially dravidian languages like tamil and kannada. these can also help develop machine translation systems equipped for several dialects within a given language pair. further, we would like to expand our data and examine other factors responsible for code-switching and codemixing.