Home> Archive> 2014> Volume 4 Number 2 (Mar. 2014)
IJSSH 2014 Vol.4(2): 128-131 ISSN: 2010-3646
DOI: 10.7763/IJSSH.2014.V4.332

Language and Topic Choice among Prolific and Non-Prolific Posters on an Arabic-English Website

R. Bianchi

Abstract—Mahjoob.com is a popular Jordan-based website featuring dozens of discussion forums in both English and Arabic. This paper explores the language and topic choices among the 1,261 posters that authored posts on mahjoob.com during a 14-month period. The results indicate that the top 10 prolific posters (i.e. those who have posted more than 1000 messages) have very different language and topic preferences to the rest of the posters. Prolific posters prefer to post using Arabic and to contribute to humor-related forums whereas non-prolific posters prefer to post in 3arabizi, a mixture of Arabic and English written in Latin script, and to a lesser extent, in English. These non-prolific posters tend to post to a variety of other topical forums besides the humour-related forums.

Index Terms—Arabic, CMC, code choice, discussion forums.

R. Bianchi is with the Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar (e-mail: rmbianchi@vcu.edu).

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Cite: R. Bianchi, " Language and Topic Choice among Prolific and Non-Prolific Posters on an Arabic-English Website," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 128-131, 2014.

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