Many Tongues, Multiple Networks: A corpus-based pragmatic study
of multilingualism on Nigerian virtual political space

This presentation concludes by suggesting that online multilingual discursive
practices may be indicative of or closely linked to people's
purpose-driven offline sociolinguistic practices and identities deployed for
socio-pragmatic goals.

Tunde Opeidi

bopeibi@unilag.edu.ng University of Lagos, Nigeria

This study examines the increasing utilisation of the Internet and related
digital media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for
political activities and civic engagement in Nigeria. It focuses specifically
on the ways in which political actors and citizens in Nigeria draw on the
existing multilingual resources within the Nigerian sociolinguistic ecosystem
in their web-based political interactions.

The study also discusses how these stakeholders use a combination of mixed
codes in online interactions with political issues and political stakeholders
to reshape the political space and promote participatory democracy.

Theoretical insights that underpin the study adopt approaches from 
computer-mediated discourse analysis and pragmatics. The data set consists of
a range of media multilingual-based online political posts between 2011 and
2015 elicited from our corpus construction project, CONNMDE (Corpus of
Nigeria New Media Discourse in English). The methodological

procedures also utilise some digital humanities software packages and
concordances such as Sketch Engine and AntConc3.4 for data harvesting and to
complement the qualitative and quantitative analyses

(Baker, et al, 2008:275).

Generally speaking, the study reports some findings on the ongoing digital
humanities project focusing on new media corpus construction. It then isolates
and identifies clear instances of deliberate deployment of multilingual
resources influenced by and rooted in ethnolinguistic identities as
communication inclusion strategy. It equally confirms that Nigerian
politicians use political websites with multilingual texts to encode acts of
political persuasion and convey pragmatic meanings.