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Impoliteness among multilingual Facebook users in Congo Brazzaville

  • Jean Mathieu Tsoumou

    I obtained my PhD in English studies with a focus on computer-mediated communication and politics at Computense university of Madrid in 2018. I am currently in charge of teaching general English courses, ESP and International Communication. My research interest is mainly in Computer-mediated communication, politics, pragmatics, communication, and multilingualism.

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Published/Copyright: May 3, 2023

Abstract

This paper analyses a 265,147-word corpus of multilingual Facebook comments discussing political news in Congo-Brazzaville, collected between 2015 and 2016. The commenters use French, Lingala, Kituba, as well as ethnic languages such as Laary, to provide evaluations of the news and engage in impolite exchanges with each other. It is now widely evidenced that digital discourse is increasingly attracting (im)politeness research, going from Western-centric grounds into exploring other societies and cultures such as Asia and Africa. Despite this, (im)politeness research in multilingual contexts – such as Congo-Brazzaville – remains neglected. The paper aims to redress this imbalance by analysing impoliteness in Facebook interactions among Congolese users. Thus, the paper provides insights into how the notion of impoliteness plays out in a context that is polarized politically and sociolinguistically. The findings suggest that what triggers impoliteness is not just the desire to either claim own grounds, or the fact that the target of the impolite comment is a user with an opposing view, but also the desire to control what others should and should not say (or do). Furthermore, the interpretation of impoliteness in this context lies in the users’ abilities to understand the role of language alternation as it is framed in the comments.


Corresponding author: Jean Mathieu Tsoumou, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Villaviciosa de Odón, Madrid, Spain, E-mail:

About the author

Jean Mathieu Tsoumou

I obtained my PhD in English studies with a focus on computer-mediated communication and politics at Computense university of Madrid in 2018. I am currently in charge of teaching general English courses, ESP and International Communication. My research interest is mainly in Computer-mediated communication, politics, pragmatics, communication, and multilingualism.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank all the participants who took part in the investigation. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers who helped better shape this paper.

  1. Conflict of interest statement: There is no conflict of interest in this study.

Appendix

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Received: 2021-11-05
Accepted: 2023-01-13
Published Online: 2023-05-03
Published in Print: 2023-07-26

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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