Andrew Ikpomwosa Egbah

This chapter explores the multimodal representation of personal life and cultural identity in the Instagram posts of four gaming influencers from diverse backgrounds: PewDiePie, Valkyrae, Ninja, and Pokimane. Utilising Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen's Social Semiotics framework, the analysis focuses on how these influencers blend visual and textual elements in non-gaming posts to depict themes like family life, professional achievements, and personal moments. This study highlights how influencers use Instagram's platform-specific features to foster a sense of authenticity and relatability with their audience. The findings support the argument that these gaming influencers effectively deploy multimodal communication to connect with their audiences at a human (sometimes parasocial) level. Furthermore, the study reveals how these multimodal strategies contribute to broader discussions on digital communication

Postcolonial African identities, bearing the imprints of violent colonial heritage and ongoing sociopolitical struggles, are linguistically enacted in contemporary African prose. This article undertakes a comparative sociopragmatic analysis of four novels (Gurnah'sAfterlives, Slimani'sThe Country of Others, Dangarembga'sThis Mournable Body, and Soyinka's Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth) to examine how speech acts, modality patterns, metaphorical constructions, code-switching, and narrative voicing strategies perform postcolonial subjectivities across distinct regional contexts. Grounded in Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis and Homi Bhabha's theorisation of hybridity and the Third Space, the study reveals systematic pragmastylistic patterns through which characters negotiate colonial legacies, patriarchal constraints, and neoliberal pressures. Although regional variations emerge in terms of unique neocolonial challenges in Eastern, Northern, Southern, and West African subregions, the sociopragmatic strategies reveal transnational commonalities in how postcolonial subjects forge hybrid identities within linguistic Third Spaces. The research contributes methodologically to the field of postcolonial literary research through the application of empirical linguistic analysis to demonstrate that identity is not just a thematic construct but an observable linguistic practice.

This comparative study explores how Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (2025) deploy language to portray societal dysfunction in Nigeria. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of Leo Hickey’s pragma-stylistics and Biber and Conrad’s register variation, this paper applies a content analysis method to systematically investigate narrative episodes, dialogue, and descriptive passages, revealing the authors’ stylistic choices. Key findings show how both authors reflect and critique issues of corruption, gender norms, and diaspora challenges through their linguistic choices. This study contributes to sociolinguistic stylistics by offering a comparative model for analysing postcolonial texts, and enriches postcolonial literature studies by highlighting how language is a fundamental tool for articulating and critiquing power structures and social disorder.

This study focuses on analysing the linguistic features of the special variety of English used at the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) Base Kaduna, employing Halliday’s Register analysis as our theoretical framework. Through a corpus of twelve expressions selected through purposive sampling within the NAF domains, the research identifies and explores the linguistic dimensions of military communication using the contextual tools of field, tenor, and mode of discourse. The findings reveal that context influences the usage, interpretation, and relevance of special military expressions, ensuring ef ective communication, maintaining order, and fostering group cohesion among speakers in the military environment. The paper also emphasizes the importance of employing Halliday's register analysis for comprehending the unique features of the military register within the Nigerian Air Force settings.

Language is a vital tool for communal interaction and social mobility. The levels of its application in any given society usually provide an insight into the social structure of the group. Consequently, modern linguistic studies have focused their attention on the relationship between a linguistic code and the society in which it is being employed. It was in this perspective that this research,‘Language and Social Class: An Analysis of Language Variation in the Nigerian Air Force Base, Kaduna.’was carried out. Using Milroy’s Social Network theory in line with the results from questionnaire analysed via the ANOVA statistical technique, the findings revealed that there is a statistically significant relationship between the levels of linguistic variation and class structure in the Kaduna NAF Base. The findings also implied that some selected variables, such as group membership, educational attainment and gender distinctions, could have an overt effect on the choice and distribution of linguistic variation in a given speech community.