“Your English Is Suspect”: Language, Communication, and the Pathologization of Nigerian Cyber Identity Through the Stylistic Imprints of Nigerian E-Mail Scams

Abstract

Identity is embedded not just in language but in the communicative and interactional singularities of language and in the linguistic habitus that speakers bring to bear in their relational and discursive encounters. This study explores how Nigerian English speakers, through the ubiquitous 419 e-mail scams, bring with them distinctive stylistic and sociolinguistic imprints in their quotidian dialogic encounters with other English users in the world, which at once construct, constrict, and constrain not only them but also other Nigerian English speakers. I also show links between demotic articulations of Nigerian English in Nigeria and its symbolic approbation and reproduction in the Nigerian news media, and how this conspires to construct Nigerian identity online.