Digital platforms reshape use of formal and informal Arabic online
Digital diglossia: Arabic between X and Facebook
Computation and Language
Summary
Arabic speakers use two main varieties of their language: formal Standard Arabic and informal Colloquial Arabic. This study looked at tens of thousands of Arabic posts on X and Facebook to see when and where each variety is used. It found that people tend to use more formal Arabic for political topics and that each platform encourages different mixes of formal and informal language depending on the topic. The study shows that digital communication changes how these language varieties are used but doesn’t erase the traditional differences between them.
What this means in practice
- •For social media managers: Tailor Arabic content style for X or Facebook by aligning language formality with topic trends shown by user posts.
- •For natural language processing developers: Improve Arabic language models by integrating platform- and topic-specific preferences for formal versus colloquial usage discovered in online data.
Authors
Fahad Al Hussen, Mohammed Q. Shormani
Abstract
This study highlights the distribution of Standard Arabic (SA; H(igh) variety) and Colloquial Arabic (CA; L(ow) variety) across X and Facebook. 16754 public posts were collected via Python, with 10000 retained as the net dataset. Posts were classified into 7 discourse categories: *politics, technology, science, business, culture, fun,* and *sports*. Bivariate analyses, including Chi-square tests and Cramer's V (CV), examined associations among platform, discourse category, and diglossic choice, while binary logistic regression with Platform x Discourse Category interactions tested whether these associations varied across platforms. Findings reveal that there are significant associations between discourse category and diglossic choice on X, chi-square(6, *N* = 5000) = 600.35, p < .001, CV = .347, and Facebook, chi-square(6, N = 5000) = 1249.52, p < .001, CV = .500. Across platforms, platform was also associated with diglossic choice, chi-square(1, N = 10000) = 262.16, p < .001, CV = .162. Binary logistic regression further shows higher odds of SA use on X than Facebook in the political reference category (*OR* = 1.31, p = .0028), with significant platform-by-domain interactions for Culture (OR = 2.65), Fun (*OR* = 6.34), Sports (*OR* = 26.71), Science (OR = 0.41), and Technology (OR = 0.71). The study concludes that the diglossic use of SA and CA contributes to the growing body of research on digital discourse, unveiling that the digital age reshapes but does not erode diglossic boundaries, giving rise instead to a reconfigured digital diglossia.