Anti-language, Slang and Cyber Scam Subculture among Urban Youth in Southwestern Nigeria.

Ajayi, Temitope Michael

Cyber scam, an on-trend subculture among Nigerian urban youth, has posed a major security and economic threat to the global community. As part of the strategies developed to 'institutionalise' their illicit business and evade the punitive hand(s) of the Nigerian and international law enforcement agencies, cyber scammers in Nigeria have devised various strategies, including the deployment of anti-language and slangy expressions in their transactional and social interaction. Extant studies on cybercrime in the Nigerian context have largely addressed the phenomenon from the sociological, economical and information technological perspectives with little attention paid to it from a linguistic perspective. Therefore, this study, gathering data with the deployment of ethnographic techniques, and drawing from Halliday's (1976) concept of anti-language, investigates the linguistic strategies employed by cyber scammers in Southwestern Nigeria in their social and transactional interaction. Findings reveal slangy coinages and overlexicalisation, and relexicalisation (semantic extension) are anti-language phenomena characterising cyber scammers' language in region. These are achieved through the deployment of linguistic sub-strategies such as reduplication, clipping, blending and acronym (initialism).

NIGERIA; URBAN youth; LAW enforcement agencies; SUBCULTURES; ECONOMIC security; SLANG

International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 2019, Vol 13, Issue 2, p511

0974-2891

Academic Journal

10.5281/zenodo.3709011