Sociolinguistic Study of Stereotype Forms in Social Media

The paper examines a sociolinguistic study of stereotype language in Nigeria's social media discourse. The study showed various forms of stereotype in the social media. It focused on stereotype through language as seen in social media space arising from ethnic, political, religious, gender and occupational differences. The preponderance of negative stereotype in social media is the concern of this research because it can be incendiary. Though there are many social media platforms where stereotype abounds, like listserves, twitter, youtube, whatsapp, instagram, this work is limited to posts on facebook and twitter. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which is about linguistic relativity and Henri Tajfel's Social Identity Theory which proposes that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. Data is derived from stereotype posts by Nigerians in social media. The study adopts qualitative method using unstructured form of data collection, description and explanation. Twenty stereotype posts were randomly tracked from facebook and twitter accounts and randomly picked in the countdown to the 2015 general elections in Nigeria to 2017. This work tries to help social media users to be mindful of what they post as they have potential for civil unrest and many unintended happenings. It will help government (policy makers) to come to grip with the problems of language associated with stereotype emanating from social media and initiate ways to tackle them, maybe through legislation. On the whole, this research tackles stereotype language in social media discourse by making for urbane use of language thereby, engendering more civility and social order.