Language Choice in Nigerian Social Media Hate Speech

Language choice in multilingual societies is rarely arbitrary. In Nigerian, English, Nigerian Pidgin (NP) and indigenous languages are strategically deployed in online discourse, yet little is known about how they function in hostile contexts. Here we conduct the first systematic analysis of NP in online hate speech on two platforms, Twitter and Instagram. Using a linguistically enriched annotation scheme, we label each post for class, targeted group, language variety, and hate type. Our results show that NP is disproportionately used in offensive and hateful discourse, particularly against Hausa, women, and LGBTQ+ groups, and that insults are the dominant hate strategy. Cross-domain evaluation further reveals that classifiers trained on Twitter systematically over-predict hate on Instagram, highlighting challenges of domain transfer. These findings underscore NP’s role as a linguistic resource for hostility and its sociolinguistic salience in amplifying stereotypes and affect. For NLP, the work demonstrates the need for NP-specific resources, sensitivity to figurative strategies, and domain adaptation across platforms. By bridging sociolinguistics and computational modeling, this study contributes new evidence on how language choice shapes online hate speech in a multilingual African context.