Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The evolving nature of journalism through digital platforms has prompted scholarly enquiry on the narratives, practices and outputs by non-traditional actors in Africa's communication ecology. Informed by interpretative community theory and discourse-stylistics, this article analyses stylistics in Indigenous language on non-mainstream or peripheral journalism platforms. A qualitative content analysis was applied on two popular Zimbabwean non-mainstream platforms on Facebook, namely iHarare.com and Hatirare263 that publish in Shona language. Follow up in-depth interviews with the administrators of the pages were employed to extract perspective as the study answered two questions: What are the stylistic devices used by content creators in Indigenous language on non-mainstream platforms, and why do they employ such devices? The findings of the study show that iHarare.com and Hatirare263 use street lingo in summative captions, code-mixing and switching, and satire to reinforce the voice of the community, somewhat circumventing the English algorithm. The article argues that Indigenous language news outlets reflect the ever-changing lingo in peripheral journalism and the cultural flexibility of citizen discursive communities.
Limukani Mathe (Tue,) studied this question.