📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
The digital communication practices of Nigerian youth in online spaces, characterised by dynamic multilingualism, creative code-mixing, and fluid language identity performance, constitute a relatively unexamined domain of French language practice that challenges conventional framings of French as a classroom subject or formal institutional language. This study investigates French language practices among Nigerian youth in digital online spaces, examining how French is used, valued, and mixed with other languages in social media, gaming, online community, and content creation contexts. A digital ethnography design was employed, with eighteen months of participant observation conducted across five online platforms: Twitter/X, TikTok, Discord servers, WhatsApp communities, and YouTube comment sections, targeting communities with documented Nigerian French-using membership. Observation was supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 42 Nigerian youth social media users who used French in their online communication, and discourse analysis of a corpus of 15,000 French-containing posts from Nigerian accounts. Translanguaging theory, digital sociolinguistics, and language ideology frameworks guided analysis. Results reveal three primary modes of French use in Nigerian digital spaces: performative French for prestige signalling in lifestyle and fashion content; functional French for cross-border communication with francophone followers and contacts; and playful code-mixing French in comedy and meme production that strategically deploys French phonological and lexical features for humorous effect. French digital literacy is significantly higher among youth with university French study backgrounds. The study argues that digital multilingual practices constitute an underutilised resource for motivating formal French instruction. Keywords: digital multilingualism, French language, Nigerian youth, online practices, translanguaging
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