This paper investigates the lexico-semantic role of Pidgin in political headlines published by BBC News, with the aim of identifying lexical choices and language use in the media. Using a mixed design within the framework of SFG, the study analysed 10 purposively selected headlines drawn from 105 BBC news articles published between January and June 2025. The headlines construct reality through five categories, such as government policies, legislative activities, political party announcements, political controversies and conflicts, or legal cases involving politicians, revealing how Pidgin functions as an accessible medium for discourse. Findings show that headlines rely on action-oriented verbs, idioms, and interrogatives to simplify complex realities while maintaining cultural familiarity and emotional connection. From a linguistic perspective, these lexical choices reveal ideational interpretation of events in experiential terms, interpersonal connections with solidarity, and textual organization of information that reflects coherent structures. The study found 349 words, of which 103 were Pidgin lexis, yielding a proportion of 29.5%. This high proportion supports BBC News Pidgin as a lexically marked and metafunctionally distinct from Standard English news, revealing how lexical choices are driven towards communicative goals rather than stylistic ones. Further studies could explore comparative framing across Pidgin and Standard English news.
Salihu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.