A Sociolinguistic Study of Iraqi Parliamentary Electoral Campaign Slogans

Political slogan is one of the most essential means that political parties and candidates adopt to communicate with electorate, especially when party identification is in decline. The practice of political advertising in Iraq started with the use of posters, handbills and printed materials. This study aims to shed some light on how candidates and political parties communicate with their audience in Iraq . The first aim of the current study is to investigate slogans used in Iraqi parliament election ( 2014) from a sociolinguistic perspective. The sample collected to the study comprises ninety slogans from different places in Iraqi provinces, to accomplish this objective approach. The investigation of the language functions that the slogans conveys is another aim of the study. Moreover, it shows the linguistic (semantic, phonological, and syntactical) characteristics that identify slogans. It also highlights the sociopolitical features that slogans represent.