📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study presents a longitudinal corpus study of language change in Nigerian Yoruba as evidenced in social media communication over the period 2019 to 2024, making an original contribution to the empirical documentation of real-time language change in one of Africa's major language varieties. The digitisation of everyday communication among Yoruba speakers has created an unprecedented observable record of language in use, yet no longitudinal corpus study has systematically tracked Yoruba language change through digital data over a multi-year period. The research constructs a longitudinal corpus of 3 million tokens of Yoruba-base social media text, balanced annually across the five-year period, compiled from Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp broadcasts with appropriate ethical consent protocols. The corpus is annotated for lexical, morphological, and syntactic variables, and time-series analysis is applied to track change in ten selected linguistic variables including code-switching frequency, new lexical item adoption rates, pronoun system modification, and tonal diacritic use in digital writing. Findings document accelerating lexical innovation in Yoruba digital discourse, with new lexical items introduced through social media reaching detectable adoption in the corpus within six to eight months on average. Morphological simplification in informal digital registers and a decline in tonal diacritic marking across the five-year period are also documented. The study establishes a replicable methodology for digital language change documentation in under-resourced languages and contributes original longitudinal data to the Yoruba linguistics literature. Keywords: language change, Yoruba, longitudinal corpus, social media, digital discourse.
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