The Effect of Dialect and Gender on the Representation of Consonants in Jordanian Chat
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Abstract
As in offline communication, language use in computer–mediated communication (CMC) reflects aspects of society and culture. In Jordan, phonetic variation in Spoken Jordanian Arabic (SJA) reflects dialect differences. This study investigates variation in the representation of SJA consonants in Jordanian Chat (JC) in a corpus of online texts drawn from three Jordanian chat rooms. The focus is on identifying variants of consonants and studying them in relation to their users. The results show that perceptions about dialects and associations of dialect with gender are reflected in JC, especially as regards the phoneme /q/. Chatters creatively transcribe their dialectal consonants in order to preserve the distinctness of their variants in JC. Shift from one dialectal variant to another is also evident in JC and tends to be performed by males when chatting with females. We suggest that the justification for this practice is that males aim to accommodate their chat to that of females in order to gain social acceptance.
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