NIGERIANISMS AND NIGERIAN SOCIO-CULTURAL IDENTITIES: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY EXPRESSIONS IN COMPUTERMEDIATED COMMUNICATION

Abstract

There is an emerging but popular trend of communication among educated Nigerians, which serve their communicative needs, on social media platforms/networks, called Nigerianisms. The concept of Nigerianisms support the variety of English called Nigerian English. Previous studies on Nigerian English have focused mainly on instances of Nigerianisms as used in Nigerian literary works, the print media and religious discourse. Despite the significance of the electronic media in terms of communication, relevance and population, relatively few studies have been dedicated to study English usage in that virtual speech community. Social media is currently the largest gathering of humans from around the world, so it is pertinent to study English as it is used on social media platforms. This study, therefore, examines the use of a variant form of English by Nigerians across different social media platforms with regards to culture and identity. Hymes’ Ethnography of Communication and Herring’s Computer mediated Communication were employed as the theoretical framework. The corpus for the study comprises 25 Nigerianised expressions that were purposively collected from comment sections/threads of @Instablog and @tiwasavage on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The study revealed how the emerging and popular expressions which are culture-bound have reconstructed Nigerian socio-cultural realities, experiences and identities.