Detecting Qassimi Saudi Dialect in Saudi Digitally-mediated Communication: A Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

This paper argues that there are some phonological, morphological and semantic spoken features that are faithfully transmitted to written texts in written interactions via social media. The study adopts a mixed methods approach to detect whether there is a match between the spoken Qassimi Saudi Dialect and its written counterpart. The data for this study comes from WhatsApp textual chats exchanged between 103 Qassimi Saudi speakers. In addition to the linguistic analysis of chats, an online questionnaire was employed to examine the perception of Qassimi as well as non-Qassimi Saudi speakers on whether words elicited from the data are from the Qassimi dialect or not. The findings indicate that some spoken features of Qassimi Arabic have been found in the written digitally-mediated communications of Qassimi speakers. Qassimi Dialect spoken features are found at the phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic levels. The findings of this study have a number of practical and methodological implications for linguists and dialecticians