Analysis of Person Deixis in Buhari’s 2019 Victory/ Democracy Day Speech of June 12,2019

Politicians resort to ‘soft power' to influence others and to persuade them to support their attitudes about given issues through the use of language as a persuasive power. Among the linguistic tools adopted to achieve specific goals is the pronominal system. The present study> tries to investigate the use of person diexis in the democracy day speech of President Muhammad Btihari of Nigeria. It adopts van Dijk's(2001) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach as the theoretical model which is an attempt to unmask ideologically permeated and often obscured structures of power, political control and dominance as well as strategies of discriminatory inclusion and exclusion in language use. The study adopts quantitative method of analysis which is based on the use of statistical approach to get empirical data. The statistical approach consists of counting the number of occurrences of the person diexis. The analysis done reveals that among the three person diexis that were recurrent in the text, the plural personal pronoun ‘we ’ has the highest number of occurrence showing that President Muhammad Buhari through her speech tries to foster a bond of unity and togetherness with the Nigerian people.