“Una no kon sabi anything”: The Pragmatics of Discourtesy in Selected Nigerian GenZee Celebrities’ Social Media Posts

Abstract

GenZee celebrities, while trying to confront the unbridled criticisms of cyber hecklers, resort to discourteous lexical items to save their damaged faces. Although studies on GenZee’s language use and style on social media have been explored, significant scholarly effort has not been solely dedicated to the uncivil language choices of Nigerian GenZee celebrities (henceforth NGCs). This study investigates the discourteous patterns that characterise the social media posts of Nigerian GenZee celebrities in response to the verbal and non-verbal taunts of netizens and how the GenZees’ social identities are subtly unraveled. Jacob Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act theory serves as the theoretical basis for the analysis. Selected posts of Habeeb Hamzat (Peller) and Amadou Elizabeth (Jarvis), two popular Nigerian GenZee social media influencers/celebrities, were purposively selected and retrieved on Tiktok and Twitter (X). The descriptive design was adopted and data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Findings reveal that the social media posts of the two NGCs are furnished with impoliteness strategies through grammatical subversion, spiritual invocation, blame-shifting/buck-passing, and pidginisation to show utmost discourtesy and displeasure to the intended recipients of their posts and to address the excesses of cyberbullies. These devices were activated through specific pragmatic acts: condescending, praying, cursing practs, questioning and asserting practs. Through specific linguistic and pragmatic features/techniques, NGCs suppressed face attacks from individuals or situations perceived as threats to protect their public self-image (faces).o contribute to the evolving body of knowledge on the discursive manifestations of impoliteness/discourtesy among GenZee speakers (precisely NGCs)