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Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competing discourses: On the one hand, a concern regarding the indexical erasure of AAVE as a variety of English spoken by Black Americans; and on the other, claims of a new register of ‘internet language’. Concluding, we argue that, in the participatory context of social media, the circulation of the label ‘TikTok language’ poses an issue for the raciolinguistic enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have become an urgent public health crisis and a significant cause of death, especially in developing countries like Ghana, where news media coverage influences public understanding of health issues, just as it does in other jurisdictions. This study employs an unsupervised machine learning method on 505 Ghanaian news articles published between 2014 and 2024 to analyze how the themes related to NCDs and the main attribution frames are presented. The results identified four primary thematic frames: stakeholder partnerships and crisis management efforts, Ghana’s NCD risk factors, systemic barriers to managing the crisis, and advances in healthcare technology. Additional attribution analysis revealed two key frames: a lifestyle frame, highlighting individual choices, and a socio-economic frame, connecting NCDs to poverty, weak health systems, urbanization, and environmental factors. Findings reflect global trends while emphasizing the influence of local structural factors in NCD crisis narratives. The study demonstrates the usefulness of computational methods for analyzing large news media text corpora, showing how Ghanaian news media mirror international framing patterns and also reveal unique local barriers and dependencies during public health emergencies.

An organization’s message design during crises is crucial to maintaining its legitimacy. This study extends the framing theory to analyze the strategies used by Ghana’s and Nigeria’s central banks to build discursive legitimacy during their respective financial crises. It also helps to decolonize our understanding of how central banks respond to crises and preserve their license to operate using evidence from two African countries. 

The article analyzed 28 statements, ranging from one to 13 pages, issued by the two central banks in their efforts to respond to and manage the crises, using a qualitative frame-analytical approach.

The two central banks emphasize four similar but nuanced frames: stability and resilience in the financial sector; consumer protection and interest; national interest and sovereignty and technological efficiency and inclusion. These findings suggest that, although a shared foundational narrative exists, each country’s central bank employs unique legitimation strategies that align with its socio-economic context. 

This study offers practitioners, researchers and students some valuable insights into how public relations technicians in Africa develop crisis response messages during financial emergencies. It also highlights findings that show the reflective situational and cultural factors shaping the content of crisis statements. This study advances broader discussions of discursive legitimation during financial crises and crises more broadly, while also helping overcome the limitations of geographical viewpoints in crisis studies.