Abstract
Arabizi is a trendy language phenomenon utilized by young Arabs to communicate across various social platforms. Young Kuwaitis seem to not be any exception in that regard. This paper aims mainly at investigating the linguistic features of Arabizi as produced by the young generation in Kuwait, and the reasons for which the practice has been persistent amongst the youth community. The main corpus data was collected from spontaneous WhatsApp chats of 35 young Kuwaiti respondents who provided 400 of their e-messages to be linguistically analyzed by the researcher. A digital questionnaire was also implemented to illicit respondents’ responses on the reasons for which young Kuwaitis use Arabizi in their e-messages. Due to the heterogeneity of the spontaneous corpus, supplemental data was provided from a story writing that was sent to the respondents to be re-written in the style they choose when they normally chat on WhatsApp. From a linguistic point of view, the study reveals a number of tendencies that place Arabizi as a unique method of communication with a profile that employs both transcription and transliteration in the way it represents its consonants vs. vowels, Kuwaiti dialectical phoneme shifts and the wide use of extralinguistic features. Intensive code-switching and mixing has also been displayed. The present study also signifies a number of sociolinguistic reasons for which Kuwaiti users of Arabizi employ the script in their e-communication across social platforms.
Highlights
Responses for the language normally used when they communicate over their smartphones show around 45% using Arabizi, 32% using a mixture of English alphabet and Arabic alphabet, as opposed to only 20% using Kuwaiti only in an Arabic alphabet
When the respondents speak to their parents, a drastic change in the linguistic profile has been indicated, with around 80% claim using Kuwaiti only in Arabic alphabet, 15% Arabizi, and around 5% mixing between Arabic when they converse in Kuwaiti and English when they switch to English
When respondents converse with their siblings, around 40% claim using Kuwaiti in Arabic alphabet, 20% claim they converse in Arabizi, and around 20% claim they use Arabic alphabet when they converse in Kuwaiti and Latin alphabet to converse in English
Summary
This paper aims mainly at investigating the linguistic features of Arabizi as produced by the young generation in Kuwait. The study aims to identify the reasons for which the practice has been persistent amongst the youth community in the country. With this in mind, the present study is an ambitious attempt to answer the following research questions: A. What are the main linguistic features of Kuwaiti Arabizi as performed by young Kuwaitis in relation to, Consonants and vowels’ preservation/ deletion?. Practicing code switching, code mixing, or both?. Implementation of Basic or Advance Arabizi systems?. B. Why do young Kuwaiti users of electronic mediated communications (EMC) use Arabizi?
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