📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
Digital social media platforms constitute a primary arena for youth identity construction in contemporary Nigeria, and the language practices of Nigerian youth on Instagram encode complex negotiations of local, national, and global identities through innovative multilingual strategies. This study investigates identity construction in the language practices of Nigerian youth on Instagram, using a digital sociolinguistics framework that treats online language as a site of social identity performance rather than mere communication. A data corpus comprising three thousand Instagram captions, comments, and story text samples produced by one hundred Nigerian youth accounts, fifty Lagos-based and fifty Abuja-based, was assembled and subjected to multimodal discourse analysis and sociolinguistic coding. Identity construction strategies identified include the deployment of trending Nigerian Pidgin slangs as markers of insider cultural belonging, the strategic mixing of Yoruba or Igbo identity-marking phrases within predominantly English text, the use of African American Vernacular English features as global youth culture affiliation markers, and the deployment of ostentatious English register switching to construct class aspiration identities. Comparative analysis of Lagos and Abuja accounts reveals that Lagos accounts show more Yoruba-Pidgin mixing while Abuja accounts show more AAVE feature deployment, reflecting the distinct cultural milieus of the two cities. The study contributes to digital sociolinguistics and to the understanding of language, globalization, and identity in young Nigerians' online lives. Keywords: identity construction, Instagram, Nigerian youth, digital sociolinguistics, multilingual practices.
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