92 New Yoruba idioms and idiomatic expressions: a new mode of expression in political arena Dayo Akanmu New idioms and idiomatic expressions, which are modern stock expressions, constitute communicative clogs in Yoruba routine discourses because of their semantic complexity and deviant nature. Existing studies have established their scope of usage in Yoruba music but have hardly addressed their communicative adaptability in politics. This paper investigates issues expressed in these idioms, context and strategies for using them in political arena. This is with a view to establishing their communicative and stylistic relevance in Yoruba discourses. The paper adopts Mukarovsky’s theory of Standard Language because of its capacity to explain the “differential specifica” between the language of everyday interaction and literary language. The data analysed in the study are based on different routine communicative discourses of politicians and party members on radio, during political rallies or campaign; the data are subjected to pragmatic and stylistic analysis. Nominalisation, pidginisation and dialect expressions are the strategies employed for the formation of new idioms in this paper. These strategies are used to express different political happenings contextualized in underachievement, sloganeering for support, deceit, and acceptance/rejection for second term in office respectively. New idioms and idiomatic expressions, used to express socio- political issues in Yoruba routine communication, occurred in mediated and non- mediated contexts and are conveyed through nominalization, pidginisation, and dialect expressions. The idioms reflect dynamism and modernity-constrained stylistic choices in Yoruba. Keywords: new idioms, Yoruba, strategies, politics, stylistics. 1. Introduction This paper was motivated by the saying ‘the world is a global village’ (globalisation) which imposes new global communicative challenges on the Yoruba people especially the pol iticians and their followers. The evolution of new idioms and idiomatic expressions thus becomes a coping strategy to meet the new communicative challenges. Globalisation is a phenomenon that filters into all domain of human experience, especially politics . As a result of this, the Yoruba, politicians like any other politicians in the Third World countries, are faced with the challenges of how to express their ideas and experiences emanating from globalization. These politicians have a duty to inform, enlighten and educate their people about the latest development brought about by the wind of change blowing across the globe. At a time that Nigeria is trying to develop and sustain a democratic system of government, the Yoruba politicians cannot afford to be aloof to this global development. The politicians must be in the fore front of the urgent need to educate Nigerians about new developments in politics. In doing this, they are incapacitated with certain linguistic constraints imposed on them by their language such as the unavailability of words in their language and difficulties in getting appropriate lexical expressions for their ideas. To