Examining the Social Media Discourse: Towards a Linguistic Study of Facebook Posts Among a Selected Group of Kenyan Internet Users

Abstract

The sheer online ubiquity of Facebook is astounding. Facebook is changing the way billions of people in the world relate to one another and share information. A rapidly growing body of research has accompanied the meteoric rise of Facebook as researchers from diverse fields carry out studies on the site. This paper recognises the utility of FB as a novel tool to examine and interpret linguistic features for a selected group of Kenyan FB users. The article discusses and analyses the linguistic features in Facebook posts. Herring’s (2004) Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) theoretical framework is applied to analyse the linguistic features. Online questionnaires were used to obtain data. Keywords: CMDA, Facebook, FB, Kenya, linguistic features