International Journal of Sub-Saharan African Research (IJSSAR)

Background: Rapid social media interaction encourages linguistic economy, but syntactic reduction in multilingual English as a Second Language (ESL) context may reflect either grammatical difficulty or adaptation to digital communication.
Objective: This study examines how performance pressure, interactional immediacy, routinisation, and multilingual resources relate to syntactic economy in Nigerian ESL social media discourse.
Method: A qualitative discourse-analytic design was adopted to examine naturally occurring WhatsApp and Facebook interactions among undergraduates of Ebonyi State University. From a corpus of 360 samples collected across the university's four campuses between May 2025 and May 2026, 28 excerpts were purposively selected and analysed using an adapted Leipzig-style, three-layer presentation. Results: The findings reveal context-dependent syntactic reduction, economical interactional responses, routinised expressions, and compressed Nigerian Pidgin constructions. These patterns are associated with contextual recoverability, interactional immediacy, frequency of use, and multilingual language practices.
Conclusion: Syntactic economy in Nigerian digital ESL discourse cannot be explained solely in terms of grammatical deficiency. Many reduced forms are contextually functional, grammatically licensed, conventionalised, or traceable to Nigerian Pidgin.
Unique Contribution: The study shifts attention from predominantly orthographic accounts of Nigerian social media language to the syntactic and psycholinguistic dimensions of digital language production.
Key Recommendation: ESL pedagogy should distinguish contextually motivated digital language reduction from genuine grammatical difficulties while strengthening learners' awareness of formal and informal registers.