Analysis of Hate Speech in Responses to Two Hausa Online Media Outlets on the Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Clifford Irikefe Gbeyonron(1*),

(1) Yobe State University, Damaturu, Nigeria
(*) Corresponding Author

Abstract


Effective communication through the medium of indigenous languages serves as an invaluable instrument that facilitates every language’s right to information during pandemics. Different online media outlets used Nigerian languages to disseminate information that could enhance the success of public health measures targeted at mitigating the impact of COVID-19. However, not all of the audience absorbed the messages positively. This study attempts to analyze the use of hate speech in the comments of readers of Hausa online news items on Legit Hausa and BBC Hausa that responded to news items on COVID-19. To achieve this, the readers' comments were purposively sampled and analyzed based on the pragmatic principles of politeness and peaceful communication. In addition, systemic functional grammar was used to explicate the grammatical features of the analyzed linguistic elements of the comments written in Hausa. It was found that the comments were not only replete with inflammatory language – stripping the users of the status of communicative humanizer – inimical to preventive measures against COVID-19 but also capable of widening the opinion divide. Furthermore, most comments analyzed flout the principles of Hausa spelling and sentence construction. The study thus recommends that linguistic activists should consistently advocate for the use of Nigerian languages that conform to linguistic norms and the principles of peaceful communication that would curtail misinformation and division in the course of pandemic control.


Keywords


COVID-19, hate speech, Hausa, online media, pandemic

Full Text:

PDF

References


Agwuocha, U. A. (2020). Covid-19 induced hate speech and Austin’s speech act theory perspective: Implications for peace building. Igwebuike: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities, 6(5), 209 – 228.

Baker, P. (2023). Using corpora in discourse analysis (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Banks, D. (2019). A systemic functional grammar of English: A simple introduction. London: Routledge.

Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2019). News discourse. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Bender, J. R., Davenport, L. D., Drager, M. W., & Fedler, F. (2019). Writing and reporting for the media (12th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Benjamin, E. (2021). Trump, the coronavirus pandemic, Asian American xenophobia, and humanistic psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 61(2), 244– 259.

Benjamin, S. F. (2008). Perfect phrases for dealing with difficult people: Hundreds of ready-to-use phrases for handling conflict, confrontations, and challenging personalities. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Benlakdar, M. (2021). Sociolinguistic aspects of the COVID-19 infodemic: How is language used to transmit health information in Arabic and English? Alkalim, 6(1), 375 – 392.

Bennet, M. J. (2013). Basic concepts of intercultural communication: Paradigms, principles and practices (2nd ed.). Boston: Intercultural Press.

Cassam, Q. (2019). Conspiracy theory. Cambridge: Policy Press.

Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to offend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Danesi, M. (2023). Politics lies and conspiracy theories: A cognitive linguistic perspective. London: Routledge.

Friedrich, P., & Matos, F.G. (2012). Toward a nonkilling linguistics. In P. Friedrich (Ed.), Nonkilling linguistics: Practical applications (pp. 17 - 38). Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling.

Geyer, K., Bick, E., & Kleane, A. (2022). ‘I am no racist but . . .’: A corpus-based analysis of xenophobic hate speech constructions in Danish and German social media discourse. In N. Knoblock (Ed.), The grammar of hate: Morphosyntactic features of hateful, aggressive, and dehumanizing discourse (pp. 241 – 261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hagen, K. (2022). Conspiracy theories and the failure of intellectual critique. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2014). Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar: Fourth edition. London: Routledge.

Hristov, T. (2019). Impossible knowledge: Conspiracy theories, power, and truth. London: Routledge.

Hyland, K. (2019). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Jaszczolt, K. M. (2023). Post-Gricean pragmatics for intercultural communication. In I. Kecskes (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of intercultural pragmatics (pp. 11 - 39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, D. M. (2003). Online news: A new genre? In J. Aitchison & D. M. Lewis (Eds.), New media language (pp. 95 – 104). London: Routledge.

Li, E. S., Lui, P. L., & Fung, A. K. (2020). Systemic functional political discourse analysis: A text-based study. London: Routledge.

Mayr, A. (2019). Social media activism by Favela youth in Rio de Janeiro. In C. Hart & D. Kelsey (Eds.), Discourses of disorder: Riots, strikes, and protests in the media (pp. 175 – 193). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

McDougall, J. (2019). Fake news vs media studies: Travels in a false binary. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mills, S. (2017). English politeness and class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Odaudu-Erameh, E. (2021). Fact check: Debunking COVID-19 misinformation from the pulpit. Abuja: Authorpedia Publishers.

Partington, A. (2003). Rhetoric, bluster, and on-line gaffes: The tough life of a spin doctor. In J. A. & D. M. Lewis (Eds.), New media language (p.10). London: Routledge.

Pennycook, A., & Otsuji, E. (2020). The mundanity of metrolingual practices. In J. W. Lee & S. Dovchin (Eds.), Translinguistics: Negotiating innovation and ordinariness (pp. 9 – 23). London: Routledge.

Piller, I., Zhang, J., & Li, J. (2020). Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multilingua 39(5), 503–515.

Sclafani, J. (2018). Talking Donald Trump: A sociolinguistic study of style, metadiscourse, and political identity. London: Routledge.

Snoussi, T. (2022). Hate speech coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic: A study applied to the Springer database. Journal of Positive School Psychology, 6(4), 11462 – 11480.

Thurlow, C. (2018). Fabricating youth: New-media discourse and the technologization of young people. In S. Johnson & A. Ensslin (Eds.), Language in the media: Representations, identities, ideologies (pp. 271 – 297). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2005). Discourse analysis as ideology analysis. In C. Schäffner & A.L. Wenden (Eds.), Language and peace (pp. 17 – 36). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Warner, C. (2023). Literary pragmatics and stylistics. In M. Burke (Ed.). The Routledge handbook of stylistics (2nd ed., pp. 385 – 403). London: Routledge.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/ijels.v10i1.8363

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

    

 

IJELS Journal Sinta 4 Certificate (S4 = Level 4)

We would like to inform you that Indonesian Journal of English Language Studies (IJELS) has been nationally accredited Sinta 4 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia based on the decree  No. Surat Keputusan 152/E/KPT/2023. Validity for 5 years: Vol 7 No 2, 2021 till Vol 12 No 1, 2026

 

 

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

 

 

IJELS e-ISSN 2715-0895; IJELS p-ISSN 2442-790X

Indonesian Journal of English Language Studies (IJELS) is published twice a year, namely in March and September, by the English Language Studies (ELS) of the Graduate Program of Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.