Language of Corruption and Anti-corruption in Nigeria

Abstract

Human beings use language for diverse purposes primarily related to communication. These overlapping purposes or functions include informative, referential, personal, relational, regulative and creative. With these typologies, unlimited amounts of thoughts are communicated from intra-personal to social engineering. Corruption constitutes a key social subject of discussion among Nigerians from postindependence to date. The subject has taken its own vocabulary (register) and linguistic ethos which we set out to examine in this paper. We applied lexico-semantic descriptive model in examining how Nigerians refer to corruption and anti-corruption, drawing from written popular and creative literatures. Our analysis revealed a pool of gradable synonyms, collocates, metaphors, idioms, clichés and coinages used by Nigerian to x-ray corruption and engage anti-corruption functions. Our conclusion is that with the large scope of expressions used by Nigerians to engage the issues of corruption, corruption and corruption related practices are being semantically interrogated and challenged with the aim of reducing or possibly eradicating it for the enhancement of national development.