The Relevance of Non-verbal Communication in the Covid’19 Nigerian Environment

Abstract

Human beings, in their various environments, communicate their ideas, feelings, and life experiences through verbal or non-verbal means. The way people speak, move their bodies, gesticulate, and handle spatial relationships are important to all kinds of interpersonal communication. In most non-verbal communication situations, as experienced in the Nigerian environment during the Covid'19 pandemic, we observed that interlocutors, even in their silent states, use nonlinguistic forms to communicate meanings (through space and body language). This paper examined the imperatives of space and body language during the Covid'19 era. Much of what has occupied the interest of scholarship has been verbal (speaking and writing) rather than non-verbal communication. But the Covid'19 challenges have opened a fresh vista of attention to the other modes of communicating messages to a target audience. This paper wondered how easy and possible it was to employ appropriate multi-modal media of information dissemination targeted at controlling the ugly situation, saving the lives of people, and achieving fidelity of desired action in such a multilingual/cultural environment as Nigeria. This triggered the researchers' selection and evaluation of some of the communications made through space (proxemics), body language (kinesics), and other non-verbal symbolic modes, their imperatives, and challenges during this period. The analysis was anchored on the multimodal theory of discourse which is an approach that takes into account multiple modes of communication and how they interact with one another to produce meaning. The study is qualitative in nature and allows the interpretation of data according to the context of use. It is hoped that the findings of the paper shall not only expose the important place of non-verbal communication but will also add to the corpus of knowledge concerning the dynamics of human communication in general.