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).
[PDF]
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.