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Internet Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Bonjour la famille!

Linguistic strategies for relationship maintenance in African online communities

| Universitat Politècnica de València
| Université Douala
Rooted in African postcolonial pragmatics, this research pays particular attention to the strategic use of code-switching and other linguistic strategies for relationship maintenance in instant messaging communities that constitute translanguaging spaces. To this end, by means of a quantitative and computer-mediated communication discourse analysis, we examine the naturally-occurring interactions, on WhatsApp, of a group of 74 former university classmates who studied Spanish Philology in the mid-2000s at a Cameroonian university. The close observation of the group’s interactional strategies for relationship maintenance shows that members construct their online famille – their new social space for self-presentation – by means of (1) sociolinguistic and pragmatic norms drawn from indigenisation; (2) kinship terms as forms of address, in English and Spanish in texts mainly in French; and (3) the inclusion of religious terms as a politeness strategy. The use of Spanish as the tie-sign of the group is not as relevant as initially expected.
Keywords: African pragmatics, relational maintenance, computer-mediated discourse, postcolonial studies, language mixing practices, computer-mediated communication discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Relational maintenance through CMC
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Method of analysis
      • 3.2.1Quantitative analysis of the corpus
      • 3.2.2Discourse analysis of language use
  • 4.Results and their interpretation
    • 4.1Quantitative results
    • 4.2Discourse analysis
      • 4.2.1Nominal address terms
        • 4.2.1.1Kinship terms as forms of address: The family
        • 4.2.1.2Social titles, friendship, and endearment terms
        • 4.2.1.3Occupation and rank titles
      • 4.2.2Religion
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00103.per
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