Abstract
The term glocal has been used to describe phenomena that simultaneously blend both global and local elements (see Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995, p. 101). Nowhere is this more evident than in the existence of 3arabizi, itself a blended language composed of English and Vernacular Arabic, written in Latin letters but using arithmographemes, that is, numerals as letters to represent hard-to-transliterate sounds because they do not exist in English (see Bianchi, 2012).1 As part of a doctoral study investigating online language choice involving Arabic and English, this paper examines the unique stylistic and topical functions of 3 arabizi when compared with its linguistic forbears, that is, Arabic and English in a multilingual web forum. The findings indicate that 3arabizi is used for more informal, intimate and phatic communication than either Arabic or English, though these latter two languages or codes are not entirely formal in form and purpose either.
Highlights
Using corpus and discourse analysis methods, this report discusses the stylistic and topical differences between 3arabizi, Arabic, and English as encountered in the mahjoob.com corpus of web forum messages. Modern communications technologies such as personal computers and mobile phones have spread so quickly that they have not always adapted to local linguistic realities and conventions. This has occasioned an increase in linguistic diversity in electronic contexts such as script-switching in CMC environments (Palfreyman & Al Khalil, 2003)
This situation resulted in several Latin script-based “makeshift” orthographies such as Latin-scripted Greek, Latinscripted Japanese (Nishimura, 2003), and Latin-scripted Arabic
In order to categorize each message as containing a particular code, wordlists based on the Arabic Gigaword and the British National Corpus (BNC)
Summary
Modern communications technologies such as personal computers and mobile phones have spread so quickly that they have not always adapted to local linguistic realities and conventions. This has occasioned an increase in linguistic diversity in electronic contexts such as script-switching in CMC environments (Palfreyman & Al Khalil, 2003). Crystal (2001) attributes the source of this trend to the fact that the Latin script was forced upon early CMC adopters even though it was not their native script because earlier computer encoding systems such as ASCII were Latin-script based This situation resulted in several Latin script-based “makeshift” orthographies such as Latin-scripted Greek (see Koutsogiannis & Mitsikopoulou, 2003), Latinscripted Japanese (Nishimura, 2003), and Latin-scripted Arabic (Palfreyman & Al. Khalil, 2003; Warschauer, El Said, & Zohry, 2002). 3arabizi is a prime example of such a new linguistic resource
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