IsiZulu Cyber Language: an investigation of bullying language on social media.

Abstract

Bullying studies emerged in the 1970s in the context of the school environment. To date, the phenomenon of bullying is still investigated in the context of schools, higher education, and the workplace in any environment where human interaction exists. The arrival of the internet and the increased use of technology has led to the emergence of a virtual form of bullying known as cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is described as the harm that is inflicted using technological devices and the internet. In the South African context cyberbullying is under-investigated. This study intended to fill that gap by focussing on linguistic aspects of cyberbullying. This study aimed to establish a corpus of the isiZulu cyberbullying language used in social media communications. This was done using University of KwaZulu-Natal students as participants. The participants are currently enrolled at the institution and have active social media accounts. This empirical study used two web-based text analysis software tools: Voyant Tools and Laurence Anthony’s Anthony Concordance. These tools were used to identify the words with higher frequency in the corpus. The investigation found that for IsiZulu, sexting is the most common bullying experience, and words with sexual connotations occur more frequently in the corpus. Furthermore, the study identified differences between implicit and explicit cyberbullying using a phrasal approach and examining key words in context (KWIC). Finally, this investigation yielded data on the participants' usage practices of social media platforms.