Introduction
The advent of new information and communication
technologies (ICTs) has ushered in a new era of new media,
signalling unbounded possibilities for language and
communication studies. In actual fact, the ever increasing
mobility of the Internet the world over has opened yet other
dimensions to the study of language use in computer-mediated
environment. This has been attributed to the upsurge in the
world’s telecommunication market and its antecedent
penetration and adoption of the technology by the populace,
coupled with the improvement of the network with the third
generation (3G) mobile technology, which facilitates the
convergence of the technologies of the mobile phones and that
of the Internet. For instance, in 2006, Nigeria had an estimate
of about 8 million Internet users, many of whom relied on
equipment at cybercafés. In 2007, Internet hosts totaled 1,968.
Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.
40
In 2006 more than 32.3 million mobile cellular telephones and
1.7 million main lines were in use (International
Telecommunication Union 2007). However, in 2010 with an
estimated population of 150 million, there were 72.78 million
active GSM subscribers on all the major networks, with 6.69
million active CDMA subscribers. Within the estimated
population of the country, there were 10 million Internet users
(Miniwatts Marketing Group 2009). Of this estimation, 1.72
million Nigerians are said to be on the Facebook, with
penetration rate of 1.1%. Nigeria is thus among the leading
subscribers in Africa which has a total Facebook population of
17,607,440, with global penetration of 1.7% as at August 31,
2010 (Internet World Statistics).
These growing trends have provided opportunity to
study human interactions as they occur across the computermediated
environment. However, unlike before, when the study
of human-human interactions through the new media
technologies of the Internet and the cell phone restricted
scholarship to the investigation of language use in the immobile
technologies such as the world wide web, email, Yahoo/MSN’s
instant messengers (IM or IM’ing), Listserve and short message
service (texting) of the global system for mobiles (GSM). In
Nigeria, these features have significantly been studied against
theoretical frameworks of Conversation and Discourse Analysis
Sociology of English in Nigeria
41
(Herring 2004a, 2004b), Pragmatics (Odebunmi 2009),
Stylistics (Taiwo 2008) and Semiotics (Shoki and Oni 2008). It
is therefore very significant to explore the implication of the
mobility and ubiquity of the Internet on textual constructs and
(English) language use of Nigerian in their interactions over the
IM and the GSM-SMS platforms. This approach represents one
of the contemporary methods of investigating human language
textual constructs in computer-mediated communication.
The approach in this chapter is to observe and quantify
the lexical variations which afford mutual intelligibility and
meaning making of the textual constructs of sampled
interactions. Earlier studies in Nigeria IM and SMS studies
have focused on the forms and functions of textual messages
(Taiwo 2008), to the best of our knowledge, little or no
attention has been focused on differentiating IM and SMS
compositions with a view of understanding pattern of usage
especially as it concerns second language users of the English
language (Nigerians in this case). The central thesis is thus, to
understand the characteristics of textual constructs of Nigerians
as second language users of the English language, especially
the lexical/sentential differences afforded by the technologies
of transmission against their socio-linguistic backgrounds.
Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.
42
An Overview of CMC Studies in Nigeria
Scholarship into human-human interactions across digital
platform did not start in Nigeria until the commercialization of
the Internet and the GSM networks as earlier mentioned. This
notwithstanding, Nigerians resident within and in the diaspora,
have contributed immensely to the linguistic and
anthropological researches of computer-mediated
communication. Specifically, within the linguistic circle, giant
strides have been made. Ifukor (forthcoming) has grouped
Nigerian textual CMC activities and studies between 1990-
2010 into three broad categories viz.
(i) Web 1.0 communicative exchanges (e.g.
Bastian, 1999; Blommaert & Omoniyi, 2006;
Chiluwa, 2009, 2010a; Deuber & Hinrichs, 2007;
Moran, 2000; Ofulue, 2010; Olateju & Adeleke,
2010; Oluwole, 2009), (ii) mobile telephony and
text messaging (e.g. Awonusi, 2004, 2010;
Chiluwa, 2008; Ekong & Ekong, 2010; Elvis,
2009; Obadare, 2006; Ofulue, 2008; Taiwo,
2008a, 2008b) and (iii) social media and multiplatform
Web 2.0 discourse (e.g. Ifukor, 2008,
2009a, 2009b, 2010; Jonathan, 2010; Oni &
Osunbade, 2009; Taiwo, 2010a, 2010b) (cf. Ifukor
2011a, 2011b). In terms of technological platform
or mode in Murray’s, (1988) term, examples of
Nigerian CMC include mobile phone text
messaging (Awonusi, 2004, 2010; Chiluwa, 2008;
Ifukor, 2011a; Ofulue, 2008; Taiwo, 2008a,
2008b); Instant Messaging (Oni & Osunbade,
Sociology of English in Nigeria
43
2009); email (Blommaert & Omoniyi, 2006;
Chiluwa, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Ofulue, 2010;
Olateju & Adeleke, 2010); listserv (Bastian,
1999); Usenet newsgroup (Moran, 2000); Internet
discussion forums (Deuber & Hinrichs, 2007;
Ifukor, 2011b; Taiwo, 2010a, 2010b); blog
(Ifukor, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010); Twitter
(Ifukor, 2010, 2011c); Facebook (Ifukor, 2011d;
Jonathan, 2010), and surveys on CMC usage
(Ifukor, 2011a; Oluwole, 2009; Pyramid Research,
2010; Sesan, 2010).
It suffices to say that the year 2010 represents another landmark
in CMC scholarship in Nigerian due to the following four
reasons as pointed out in Ifukor (forthcoming),
First, Taiwo (2010c) published two edited
volumes of a handbook on digital behaviours
consisting of, among the collection, 16 papers
(single and co-authored) on various aspects of
text-based Nigerian CMC. Therefore, Taiwo's
(2010c) handbook represents the single largest
collection on Nigerian CMC to date. Second, it is
the same year that published works on Nigerian
social networking media (Ifukor, 2010; Jonathan,
2010) emerged. For instance, Ifukor's (2010)
paper on electoral activities by Nigerians in the
blogosphere and Twittersphere highlights the
relevance of blogging and social media to modern
Nigerian democratization. Thirdly, beginning
from his inaugural post on Facebook on June 28,
2010, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ)
experimented with what, for want of a better
Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.
44
terminology, can be called the first Nigerian
Facebook presidency. On October 1, 2010 CNN
named GEJ the Facebook President. This is a
remarkable endorsement of not just the person of
the Nigerian president, but also of how a global
product (Facebook) is being appropriated for
internal governance in Nigeria. Eventually, a book
based on GEJ's interactions with Nigerian netizens
was published and titled My Friends and I:
Conversations on Policy and Governance via
Facebook (Jonathan, 2010). It is argued here that
the embrace of new media technologies by the
Nigerian government has ushered in a new era of
Nigerian politics, reflecting modern trends in
digitally-aided democratization. Finally, but not
the least, two national surveys on the digital habits
of connected Nigerians were released by Pyramid
Research (2010) and Sesan (2010) in the same
year.
Examining the thrusts of contents of the Taiwo's (2010c)
sixteen-chapter handbook in relation to Nigeria, 18.75% of the
papers (i.e. Chiluwa, 2010b; Ofulue, 2010; Olateju & Adeleke,
2010), examine aspects of Nigerian email communication for
identity construction, 419 or hoaxes, and code switching. 37.5
percent of the papers (i.e. Akande & Akinwale, 2010; Balogun,
2010; Odebunmi & Alo, 2010; Olaosun, 2010; Olubode-Sawe,
2010; Taiwo, 2010c) dwell on mobile telephony and SMS as
follows: with a view of stressing their positions on the
implications of the leprous compositions of the Nigerian
Sociology of English in Nigeria
45
students on written communication as well as contextual beliefs
in the 160-character discourse by Nigerian academics, an Ecosemiotic
examination of visual codes in mobile phone
directories, typography and orthographic conventions in
Yoruba NOKIA phone terminologies, and language mixing for
phaticity and invocations. The remaining papers (43.75%) are
concerned with pedagogical and systemic issues.
As rich as all the previous Nigerian CMC studies are,
none have focused on the differences in textual compositions of
Nigerian Internet users due to notable constraints and
affordances of the CMC, notably the mobility, synchronicity
and transmission capability of the technologies involve in IM
and SMS. This gap will hope to fill in this study.
A Brief Account of Lexico-semantic Studies in Nigeria
(English)
Lexico-semantics (lexical semantics) is an important theory of
linguistic description which has gained scholarly attention in
Messaging
From table 2 above, we found that abbronyms had the highest
number of occurrence featuring at the average rate of 972 per
message for IM’ing and 139 for texting Of the total number of
messages sampled (N=75) texting occurred 1044 times almost
doubling average frequency of occurrence in IM’ing with 729
times Emoticons and vocal segregates (emotexts and vowel
extension) " all representing the non linguistic vocal
segregates, on the other hand, occurred at the average rate of
276 per message for IM’ing and 12 for texting There is less
representation of emoticons and vocal segregates in texting
Akande, A & Odebunmi, A
54
44% per message transmission, with average frequency of
occurrence at 12 The frequency of occurrence for the non
linguistic signs was 207 times This means that the total
average frequency of occurrence for all the IM textual signs is
1248 Based on these findings, we can infer that computermediated
communication of instant messaging has its
peculiarities in the textual signs such as emoticons, emotexts,
vowel/letter extension and abbronyms, even in an ESL country
like Nigeria Nigerian students thus construct and interpret
messages with the shared assumption of these CMC lexemes
One can also conclude that a IM constructed by an average
Nigerian student would reflect predominance of lexical signs
(abbronyms) over visual signs (emoticons) and much less of
these occurrences for text messaging over the mobile phones
Some of the instances of the linguistic and non linguistic signs
are presented, as extracts, as follows:
bjrealme: hw sister?
bjrealme: na you i should ask
bjrealme: una no c each order?
westsideoutlawzus2p: stop posting me joo
5 westsideoutlawzus2p: na me suppose ask u dat
bjrealme: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
bjrealme: 8-x
bjrealme: you funny ohhh
bjrealme: no be ur babe
10 bjrealme: you go dey contact each orda now
westsideoutlawzus2p: wel no b say i no dey
here 4rm her but jst 2 ask abt her welfare
bjrealme: she should be in good condition
Sociology of English in Nigeria
55
westsideoutlawzus2p: aw abt ur admision
15 bjrealme: you don finish exams'
westsideoutlawzus2p: yes
bjrealme: we just go do post jamb
(EXCHANGE 15)
The same goes for extracts 2 (Exchanges 15) Move 7
Exchange 15 shows an instance of emoticon, moves 14, 19, and
20 show instances of abbronyms peculiar to Instant Messages
which interactants may have shared assuption of
It suffices to say here that findings from the sampled
text corroborate results of earlier studies on some systems of
CMC, especially the email and newsgroup It has been found
that email and e-chat have a peculiar linguistic structure
stemming from the use of multifarious word formation
processes, emoticons and abbronyms being part of this These
signs make CMC text in Instant Messaging program to appear
more like speech than writing communication (cf Hunnicut
and Magnuson, 2001; Sjoberg, 2001; McElhearn, 2000) and
much different from that of the text messaging Let us consider
an extract of the sampled text messages:
Watz goan, be reminded that our
general meeting holds Tue 17/7 Also
our society harvest is same day at 9am
mass Pls come wt gifts O! NO
SHAKING!Enjoy ya weekend
Akande, A & Odebunmi, A
56
Contractions (operationalized here as the use of
apostrophe and excludes the possessive case) which typically
appear in informal speech and writing are examined The
reason for the analysis stems from the fact that this category of
contraction is shorter to type than the full forms, especially
when omitting the apostrophe In computer-based IM,
apostrophes require only a single keystroke, while needing four
key taps on mobile phones We calculated percent of full and
contracted forms against total potential contractions For
apostrophes, we scored only use in contractions, not
possessives In texting, 14% of all potential contractions were
contracted In IM, only 24% were contracted Mispells were not
accounted for in our quantification and these were much Being
fresher students, it is assumed that the subjects are still battling
with the mechanics of the English language
In the dimension for the analysis of punctuation,
punctuation at the ends of transmissions and the ends of
sentences was examined We also tallied use of question marks
at the ends of semantically-interrogative sentences in
comparison with use of periods, exclamation marks, or
equivalent punctuation (ellipses, dashes, commas, and
emoticons) at the ends of declaratives, imperatives, or
exclamations Texting and IM followed similar patterns, with
the proportion of texting punctuation always lower than in IM
Sociology of English in Nigeria
57
Total sentence-final punctuation was 39% for texting and 45%
for IM Transmission-final punctuation appeared in only 29%
of text messages and 35% of IMs However, for transmissions
containing multiple sentences, the sentences not appearing at
the ends of transmissions had more sentence-final punctuation:
54% of text messages and 78% of IMs, Logically,
transmission-medial punctuation is more critical than
transmission-final marks in helping recipients interpret
messages In most cases, the act of sending a message coincides
with sentence-final punctuation
To compare question marks and periods (or equivalent
marks), we divided each corpus into two categories: semantic
questions and "other" More question marks were used to end
semantic questions than periods (or equivalents) to end other
sentence types In texting, 23% semantic questions were ended
with a question mark, while only 10% of "other" bore sentencefinal
punctuation In IM, all (52%) of questions ended in
question marks, while only 41% of the remaining sentences
were punctuated More frequent use of "required" question
marks may pragmatically highlight the request for a response
from the recipient
Akande, A & Odebunmi, A
58
Conclusion
Analyses of texting and IM’ing against the socio-linguistic
backgrounds of second language user (English) much enabled
as a result of the mobility of the Internet in today’s media
landscape have shown peculiarities in the textual constructs of
Nigerian students The paucity of emoticons and heavy use of
abbronymizations in both texting and IM corpora is not in
consonant with studies of this nature in North America (Ling
and Baron 2007) and the UK (Thurlow and Brown 2003)
However, sameness in the previous reports on sentential
punctuation in texting or IM’ing, shows the degree to which
affordances and constraints of the CMC media affect uniformly
English language constructs and meaning making in online
platforms Findings have shown that usage patterns are hardly
contrastive Ling and Baron (2007) notes that students often
omitted transmission-final marks (especially periods), but their
overall punctuation choices tended to be communicatively
pragmatic The fact punctuation was consistently more
prevalent in IM than in texting probably reflects greater ease of
input in IM It is however worthy of note that student approach
textual composition with differences in their competence level
More so, text messages were consistently longer and contained
more sentences, probably resulting from both differential
costing structures and the tendency of IM sequences (but not
Sociology of English in Nigeria
59
texts) to be sent in series one after the end to form threads and
turn sequences Text messages contained significantly more
abbreviations than IMs, but even the number in texting was
small
Texting and IM’ing data, therefore, are in tangential
with respect to contractions and apostrophes: more contractions
appeared in texting, but texting used only one-third the
apostrophes found in IM Greater use of contractions in texting
could reflect the higher tendency to use abbreviated forms to
save cost (compared with IM’ing), which in turn is in
consonance with an awkward input device of the mobile phone,
even with qwert-keyboarded phones The same applies to
apostrophes in texting
References
Adegbija, Efurosibina 1989 A Comparative Study of
Politeness Phenomena in Nigerian English, Yoruba and
Ogori Multilingua 8(1):57-80
Awonusi, Victor 2004 "Little" Englishes and the Law of
Energetics: A Sociolinguistic Study of SMS Text
Messages as Register and Discourse in Nigerian
English In V Awonusi and E Babalola (eds),
Domestication of English in Nigeria: A Festschrift in
Akande, A & Odebunmi, A
60
Honour of Abiodun Adetugbo University of Lagos
Press, pp 45 " 62
Awonusi, Victor 2010 Beyond Energetics: A Sociolinguistic
Study of SMS Text Messages as Register and Discourse
in Nigerian English Online Journal of Humanities 1: 1-
16
Bamgbose, Ay 1971 The English language in Nigeria In
John Spencer (ed), The English language in West
African London: Longman, 35-48
Bamiro, Edmund 1994 Lexico-Semantic Variation in Nigerian
English World Englishes 131, 47-60
Bastian, Misty 1999 Nationalism in a Virtual Space:
Immigrant Nigerians on the Internet West Africa
Review: 1, 1 [iuicode:
http://wwwicaaporg/iuicode?101112]
Blommaert, Jan and Tope Omoniyi 2006 Email Fraud:
Language, Technology and the Indexicals of
Globalisation Social Semiotics (16)4: 573-605
Chiluwa, Innocent 2008 Assessing the Nigerianness of SMS
Text Messages in English English Today 24(1): 51-56
Chiluwa, Innocent 2009 The Discourse of Digital Deceptions
and ‘419’ Emails Discourse Studies 11: 635-660
Chiluwa, Innocent 2010a Nigerian English in Informal Email
Messages English World- Wide 31(1): 40-61
Sociology of English in Nigeria
61
Chiluwa, Innocent 2010b Discursive Practice and the Nigerian
Identity in Personal Emails Taiwo, Rotimi (Ed)
2010c Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior
and Digital Communication: Language Structures and
Social Interaction Pennsylvania, USA: IGI Global
Publishers, pp 112-129
Ekong, Uyinomen and Victor Ekong 2010 M-Voting: A
Panacea for Enhanced EParticipation Asian Journal of
Information Technology 9(2): 111-116
Herring, Susan 2004a Slouching Toward the Ordinary:
Current Trends in Computer-Mediated Communication
New Media & Society 6: 26-36
Herring, Susan 2004b Computer-Mediated Discourse
Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online
Behaviour In SA Barab, R Kling & J Gray (Eds),
Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of
Learning, New York: Cambridge University Press,