Writing between languages: the case of Arabizi

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to explore the properties of Arabizi as a system with a ‘bottom-up’ orthography that emerged in the specific context of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). The study focuses on the dialects spoken in the city of Nazareth and the villages surrounding it (N = 75). We examined the consistency of choice of Latin letters and Arabic numerals for Spoken Arabic (SA) phonemes from two complimentary perspectives: subjective reports and the corpus-based analysis of a unique writing sample in Arabizi, elicited texts. Our results show a consensus on conventions in the transcription process, with some expected variation reflecting differences between regional dialects. This indicated a high degree of normativization or standardisation in Arabizi orthography.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing
• spoken Arabic
• orthography
• non-standard script

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been defined as ‘the practice of using networked computers and alphabetic text to transmit messages between people or groups of people across space and time’ (Jacobs 2008:470).

2 Ivković defines Latinization as: ‘ … the substitution of native, non-Latin-based graphemes with graphemes from the Latin alphabet in languages where standard usage prescribes a different writing system’ (Ivković, 2015, p. 2). In the pre-Internet age, Latinization was confined to transcription (writing based on attempts to match pronunciation) and transliteration (writing based on replacing one character for another) of texts written in non-Latin-based scripts. Since English is commonly used also in the online Arab sphere (Bjørnsson, 2010), Latin script is highly accessible to Arabic-speaking CMC users (Shoufan & Alameri, 2015). Moreover, despite the increasing support of Arabic in many platforms and the availability of Arabic alphabet keyboards, the familiarity of the English keyboard has facilitated its use (Bies et al., 2014; Darwish, 2013).

3 Gorter (2006) distinguished between two main factors that affect multilingual aspects of writing. The first is ‘top-down’ or in Ivković’s terms ‘from above’. In this context, language planning is run by government, by leaders, and by language experts (Bradley, 2010; Ivković, 2016; Maguire, 1995). In contrast, ‘bottom-up’ or ‘from below’ processes describes the language practices of mostly anonymous, ‘non-expert’ users.

4 Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been defined as ‘the practice of using networked computers and alphabetic text to transmit messages between people or groups of people across space and time’ (Jacobs 2008:470).

5 Bearing in mind that PLS contains a number of different dialects, mainly Muslim, Christian, and Druze speakers of rural and urban, beside Bedouin dialects (Rosenhouse, 2002).