Abstract
ABSTRACTDigital marketing is influential to advertising businesses, with a veritable platform being SMSs. SMSs, with their widespread usage, have generated several academic enquiries. They have, however, been abused by telemarketers who inundate subscribers with spam—unsolicited and indiscriminately sent SMSs. A linguistic stylistic analysis of purposively collected spam SMS data provides insight into Nigerian spam SMSs’ unique linguistic features. Nigerian spam SMSs include categories such as network/service provider texts, bank texts, sport texts, health texts, religion texts, and bonanza/jackpot texts. Spam SMSs were primarily employed for advertisement, with phone users, the ultimate “victims,” receiving an average of 3.4 messages per day. Nigerian spam SMSs, despite usually being sent from “official” sources, contain linguistic features like textese, graphological deviation, and non-conformity to punctuation rules, while also employing code-mixing and internet text notations. They are also persuasive thanks to their use of verbal inducement, emotive language, polite salutations and “call-to-action” verbs.
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