Constructing Ethnicity Through Language in Nigerian Social Media Discourse: A Theoretical and Empirical Study

Ethnicity in Nigeria is not a pre-given social category but is actively constructed, negotiated, and contested through language and discourse in everyday interaction, and social media platforms have created new and powerful arenas for this construction with consequences for inter-ethnic relations, political mobilization, and social cohesion. This dissertation develops a theoretically grounded and empirically comprehensive account of how ethnicity is constructed through language in Nigerian social media discourse. Theoretical development engages with constructionist approaches to ethnicity, discursive psychology, and social semiotic theory to construct an original framework termed discursive ethnic identity construction that specifies the mechanisms through which language choices, rhetorical strategies, and evaluative stances jointly constitute ethnic social reality in digital contexts. The empirical programme analyses a two-year corpus of ethnicity-relevant discourse from Twitter, Facebook groups, and WhatsApp community broadcasts, encompassing approximately two hundred thousand posts, collected during periods of ethnic salience including elections, security incidents, and cultural celebrations. Corpus linguistic methods including keyword analysis, collocation networks, and discourse prosody analysis are combined with critical discourse analysis of selected extended discourse sequences. Findings document five primary mechanisms of discursive ethnic construction: ancestral indexing through lexical choices, in-group solidarity construction through code selection, ethnic attribution through third-person reference patterns, historical narrative invocation, and territorial claim assertion. Crucially, the study documents that these mechanisms are deployed differently by the same speakers in different social contexts, supporting a performative rather than essentialist ethnic identity theory. Keywords: ethnicity, discourse construction, social media, Nigeria, discursive identity.