Politeness Strategies in Nigerian English Business Communication: A Study of Corporate Emails in Lagos

This study examines the politeness strategies employed in Nigerian English business email communication within corporate organisations in Lagos State, South West Nigeria. Business communication in Nigeria blends international professional English conventions with local social norms of respect, hierarchy, and relational warmth, producing a distinctive Nigerian business English that is neither straightforwardly aligned with British or American corporate style nor purely shaped by indigenous conventions. The study draws on a corpus of 120 professional business emails collected from employees in three medium-to-large Lagos-based organisations in the banking, telecommunications, and oil services sectors, with participant consent and institutional anonymisation. Brown and Levinson's politeness theory provides the primary analytical framework, supplemented by recent scholarship on African professional communication. Analysis focuses on positive and negative politeness strategies, address term selection, opening and closing conventions, and hedging in request sequences. Findings show that Nigerian business emails employ notably more elaborate positive politeness routines than comparable British email studies suggest, including extensive opening enquiries about the recipient's wellbeing, religious greetings, and explicit expressions of respect for seniority. Request sequences show considerable indirectness and mitigation, particularly in upward communication. Gender differences in politeness strategy selection are modest but consistent with broader Nigerian social norms. The study argues that Nigerian business English constitutes a productive and culturally coherent communication variety rather than a deficient approximation of Western professional norms. Keywords: politeness strategies, Nigerian English, business email, corporate communication, Lagos.