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Abstract
When Algeria opened its markets to foreign investment starting from the early 2000s, a technological boom occurred, including the expansion of mobile phone use. New technologies have had a considerable impact on the Algerian diglossic situation, in recent decades, and have contributed in the democratisation of the local dialects, which are being increasingly used in public domains especially for advertising, in particular in radio, TV and billboards. The emergence of mobiles in Algeria is associated with the creation of new language variety, which is a mixture of French, Modern Standard Arabic, Algerian Arabic together with new abbreviations and writing conventions, which have emerged independently from the work of language planners. The present article is an empirical investigation, based on a sociolinguistic analysis of short message service (SMS) messages among Algerians. The purpose of the study is to survey the language used in SMS and to examine the implications of this emerging variety for language planning in Algeria.
Notes
Rafi (Citation2008, p. 1) identifies a novice language as one which is characterised by simple sentence structures or communication and has syntactic and lexical choices which resemble child language.
To gauge this, I conducted an informal survey among fifteen students from the Middle East who use Arabic alphabet to send SMS messages, compared with 59 out of 60 Algerian students who use Latin keys for SMS texts. The remaining Algerian texter used both Latin and Arabic alphabets in writing SMS messages.