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Orality and Identity in the Writing Practices of Politicians, Celebrities, and Activists on Lebanese Twitter

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Abstract

This article explores the practices of different social groups in writing, script, orthography, and spelling on Twitter during the Lebanese presidential election of 2016. In a diglossic, multilingual, and digraphic environment, where MSA is the unmarked writing language, I argue that Twitter is allowing different social groups more freedom in their writing practices which span a continuum between MSA and Lebanese, including translanguaging, in ways that challenge MSA-only practices by traditional power holders. This freedom is widening to include the use of local Lebanese features that allow writers to project local identities and open up the space to more marginalized participants, as well as global EMC features and international languages like English that reflect an awareness of world events and trends.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://medialanscapes.org/country/Lebanon/media/social-networks. The estimated number of users in 2021 is 402 thousand. Estimated population of Lebanon as of 2021 is 6.8 million inhabitants. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-lebanon.

  2. 2.

    See Article 11 of the Lebanese constitution, amended in 1943. Though in public perception, if a Lebanese person is asked “what language do you speak?”, they might reply “Arabic” and/or “Lebanese” interchangeably, in practicality, official and governmental documents are written in formal Arabic.

  3. 3.

    The major subdialectal groups of Lebanon being: Northern, Beqaa, southern, mountain, and Beiruti accents.

  4. 4.

    Interestingly enough, the title of the magazine does not change the long vowel alif to reflect the Lebanese pronunciation, as do some people currently, such as one of the celebrities in my data. Yet, this might be an indication that Akl is familiar with the concept of “imala” in Classical Arabic, where some Arab tribes used to pronounce the alif as [eː] too, while still writing it as [aː].

  5. 5.

    Following field guidelines and those listed in Sebba (2007, xiii) “by convention, phonetic, phonemic and orthographic representations are classified [here] by enclosing them in different types of brackets, as follows:

    1. 1.

      Phonetic: [], for example [ch aet].

    2. 2.

      Phonemic: / /, for example /kaet/

    3. 3.

      Orthographic < >, for example < cat> ”.

  6. 6.

    The specific correspondence of numerical choices to the phonemes are claimed to be because of the resemblance in shape that these numbers have with the script they represent. <ح> looks like a 7, <ع> looks like an inverted 3, etc.

  7. 7.

    For further research on engagement in Twitter accounts and how group identities are hidden or shown sociolinguistically refer to Draucker (2013).

  8. 8.

    The # symbol is used following the number of an example, when the numbered example is a repetition from a different section for different purposes.

  9. 9.

    Unfortunately, the data from the celebrities did not include instances of a noun that starts with a “sun letter”/coronal consonants, where the pronunciation of the definite marker changes, and assimilates to the sun letter, (for example: ha + al + nahr = ha-nnahr), hence possibly the spelling practice might change too.

  10. 10.

    This grapheme is dropped if an object pronoun is affixed to the verb, for example.

  11. 11.

    The pronunciation of /q/ as /g/ occurs in some dialects of the Levant, but is not as common in Lebanon.

  12. 12.

    [manjake] is a gerund form of the verb; closely related to [manjak], which literally translates to “a fucker”/ “a prick,” thus the gerund can also mean “being a prick”.

  13. 13.

    The subdialect is associated with Mount Lebanon, but additionally with the Kata’ib’Phalenges’ political party of which the politician being challenged (Samer Saade) is a member.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MESAAS, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    May Ahmar

  2. The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    May Ahmar

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  1. May Ahmar
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Correspondence to May Ahmar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Cecelia Cutler

  2. MESAAS, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    May Ahmar

  3. Modern Language Department, University of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA

    Soubeika Bahri

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Ahmar, M. (2022). Orality and Identity in the Writing Practices of Politicians, Celebrities, and Activists on Lebanese Twitter. In: Cutler, C., Ahmar, M., Bahri, S. (eds) Digital Orality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10433-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10433-6_4

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