LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY AND EMERGING PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE CHANGE IN NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATION
Keywords:
Nigeria, Social Media, Linguistic Creativity, Multilingualism, Language Change, Sociolinguistic, Digital Communication.Abstract
Linguistic creativity in Nigerian social media discourse is indicative of the interplay of multilingual resources, digital circulation and sociocultural identity in forming incipient trends in language change. This thesis investigated evidence taken from the 120 linguistic and semiotic creative linguistic strategies found in 32 different texts, using a qualitative interpretive sociolinguistic approach. Practices have been categorized into lexical-semantic, multilingual, graphological, pragmatic and multimodal, and their digital circulation, social uptake, adaptation and stabilization processes studied. Lexical-semantic (25.8%) and multilingual (24.2%) creativity are found to be the most prevalent linguistic practices, and repetition, recognition and adaptation more common than stabilization-most invented expressions appear to be transient rather than routinised. Multilingual and multimodal strategies play a significant role in creating identity, humor, solidarity and social positioning, thus showing digital discourse to involve more than just lexemic invention, but holistic semiotic creation. The paper is concluded by the finding that language change in Nigerian social media communication, is derived through a slow process of circulation, social absorption and reuse, not individual inventions; and offers a fully integrated sociolinguistic answer as to how and why language change is emerging from digitally influenced multilingual communication.References
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