Euphemistic Representations of Death in Kenyan Online Obituary and Funeral Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Conceptual Metaphor Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse linguistic and conceptual patterns of death euphemism in contemporary Kenyan online obituary, funeral and memorial texts. Although death announcements in Kenya have moved online, descriptions of Kenyan death euphemism remain largely associated with the print era and single-language studies. This article addresses this gap by analysing 99 euphemistic occurrences across 49 expression types, drawn from 31 publicly accessible Kenyan obituary, funeral, and memorial texts published between 2019 and 2026 and retrieved through logged, site-restricted searches. Each occurrence was coded for linguistic strategy, semantic category, conceptual metaphor and communicative function. Nine categories emerged, with passage and transition being the largest (32 occurrences), followed by rest, sleep and peace (18), burial as rest (14), and departure and send-off (11) and journey and race (11). By source domain, movement accounted for 58 occurrences and rest for 32, showing that these two domains accounted for 9 out of 10 occurrences. The principal conceptual mappings were DEATH IS A JOURNEY, including PASSAGE and DEPARTURE sub-mappings, DEATH IS REST, and BURIAL IS REST. Expressions naming religious destinations were present but rare. The findings indicate that Kenyan online death discourse does not merely avoid death and dying but recasts death primarily as movement and repose. Because occurrences were collected using predetermined platform quotas, the frequencies describe this dataset and should not be generalised to Kenyan online death discourse as a whole.