LANGUAGE POLICING AND LINGUISTIC SHAMING IN NIGERIAN FACEBOOK COMMENT THREADS

Metalinguistic policing has become an increasingly pervasive feature of African digital publics, transforming everyday comment threads into arenas where linguistic competence is surveilled, evaluated, and weaponised as a basis for social judgement. This study examines the dialectical relationship between language policing, linguistic shaming, and identity contestation in Nigerian Facebook comment threads, interrogating how metalinguistic correction functions less as benign pedagogy than as a mechanism of social exclusion and the reproduction of colonial linguistic hierarchies. Drawing on language ideology theory, Bourdieu's notion of the linguistic marketplace, and digital sociolinguistics, the study qualitatively analysed 312 comment threads harvested from twelve high-traffic Nigerian Facebook pages between January 2022 and December 2023. Selected instances were subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis across five recurrent policing strategies: orthographic correction, English-proficiency policing, code-switching stigmatisation, vernacular derogation, and class-indexed linguistic gatekeeping. The findings reveal that Users systematically deploy Standard Nigerian English as symbolic capital to delegitimise the repertoires of others, while Pidgin English occupies a contested position as both a marker of solidarity and a target of shame. Such policing reconfigures online communicative norms, entrenching elite linguistic authority and marginalising non-standard varieties. This research advances understanding of digital language ideologies in postcolonial African contexts, proposing a model of Hierarchical Linguistic Gatekeeping (HLG) to theorise these dynamics and urging greater critical attention to the social costs of online linguistic surveillance.