Conventionalization and variation in computer-mediated communication

This paper investigates spelling practices in Nigerian Pidgin (NigP) computer-mediated communication (CMC) as well as Nigerians’ perceptions of these. The first part is a corpus-based analysis. It shows that conventionalization of spelling variants is taking place in the absence of formal standardization. Furthermore, we observe the application of general CMC respelling strategies, e.g. vowel reduction. The second part is a survey study where participants were asked to judge the correctness of spelling variants. When the corpus results indicated the existence of a conventionalized spelling, the participants tended to either endorse this or, when shown an alternative, suggest it as the correct form; items that are more variable in the corpus yielded more mixed results. We apply and elaborate on the notion of “standardization from below” (Elspaß 2021Elspaß, Stephan. 2021. “Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’”. In Wendy Ayres-Bennett and John Bellamy, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization (1st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–114. ) and we argue that the existence of conventionalized NigP spellings makes possible deviations from these in CMC-typical fashion just as in Standard English.