Disruptive Linguistic Elements in Social Media Communication in Nigeria

Abstract

The year 2022 is expected to record 3.96 billion social media users worldwide, with 33 million users in Nigeria in January 2022. From this 4.8% growth from a year ago, social media has unprecedentedly provided dynamic avenues for sharing of information and communication. Aside the numerous merits, these new opportunities have engendered decipherable drawbacks. It is against this background that this study examines the disruptive influence of the language of social media which has its peculiar lexicon. The study adopts the relevance theory propounded by Sperber and Wilson in 1986. The relevance theory which is a new approach to the study of human communication is firmly grounded in a general view of human cognitive design. Furthermore, the study adopts a qualitative research as its research approach, while primary data was gathered from posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and a total of forty linguistic items were selected from comments made by Nigerian between 2020 and 2022 for analysis. Apart from revealing how linguistic elements of the English language have been distorted by users of the social media platforms, the findings of the study affirmed that digital social media has negative influence; particularly as people use various types of abbreviations which do not conform to the accepted form of correct grammar or sentence structure in formal writing. The outcome of these aberrations is that people are now more familiar with disrupted forms of expressions to the extent that the distinction between formal and informal writing is no longer considered important. The paper recommends further studies to investigate the correlation between disruptive linguistic elements in social media communication and academic writings of students.