Abstract

This study dwells on the study of the language used to perpetuate corrupt and illegal practices in government managed universities in southeast Nigeria. The aim of this work is to unravel the linguistic expressions of corrupt practices in public offices; especially as they occur in public universities in the southeast of Nigeria by assessing their sociolinguistic features. The qualitative research paradigm is adopted for this research. The corpus for this study is elicited using participant observation method, and oral interviews of key informants. One hundred (100) informants are categorised into 10 different focused groups. Each group is made up of ten (10) members, from the ten (10) selected public universities in the southeast. The findings from this study show that the Igbo language, being the language of the immediate environment, is predominantly used as the cues. Other language patterns discovered are the use of codeswitching (admixture of Igbo and English languages/ Nigerian Pidgin), the use of the Nigerian Pidgin, English language, and other Nigerian languages. The findings further show that the cues are better understood when the expressions are studied with focus on the participants, settings, and domains of their usage, as they offer different meanings when analysed outside the context where they are used, and are adopted by the addressers. Drawing from the data analysis using Bernstein’s theory of language code, the study concludes that the participants used more restricted language codes across the different settings as a necessary means of masking corruption.

Keywords

Corruption, Elaborate codes, Restricted codes, Sociolinguistics, Southeast, Universities,

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