Abstract

While the vital impacts of linguistic and discursive politeness on the sustenance of talk and the possibility of community-building have enjoyed a lot of attention in linguistic scholarship, attention is shifting to virtual communities with studies interrogating their language use and interactional patterns. This study seeks to further that line of inquiry by investigating politeness in Nigerian news-based virtual communities. Taking an etic interpretive analytical approach which relies on the facework and relational-work paradigms, it studies virtual communities generated by four Nigerian online newspapers purposively sampled to represent the Nigerian geo-political zones and political ideologies between 2015 and 2018. Given the relative newness of the virtual community in Africa as well as its significant impacts on socio-political activities and attitudes to democracy and governance, the research will contribute significantly to the exploration of online communicative behaviour in the African humanities.