A FORENSIC LINGUISTIC STUDY OF CRIME-RELATED IDENTITY (RE) CONSTRUCTION ON NAIRALAND

Abstract

That the Nigerian nation is crime personified is no longer news. What is, however, worrisome is the rate at which the phenomenon of crime in the context of Nigerian society is fast becoming a tribal dispute on social media. As part of the strategies adopted to stigmatise Nigerian ethnic nationalities, Internet users in Nigeria have deployed vulgar-language and derogatory expressions in constructing and reconstructing crime identities. Extant studies on crime discourse have focused mainly on subjective approaches, with little attention paid to the language used in identity (re)construction from a linguistic perspective. This study explores how language on social media reconstructs identities related to crime. Selected readers’ comments and thoughts on crime news reports in Nairaland are sampled. The theoretical framework of Couthard, Rosa and Leeuwen (2003) was adopted, while the description design was used to analyse the selected online comments with a view to explicating how language is deployed to negotiate crime-related identities in the Nigerian online ethno-cultural context. This investigation promises a clearer understanding of ethnicity and criminality in Nigerian online discussion fora.