Revue Maghrébine des Langues
Volume 7, Numéro 1, Pages 245-250
2011-12-31

Use Of Arabic In Computer-mediated Communication

Authors : Benmoussat Smail .

Abstract

During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Western-invented text communication technologies have become increasingly prevalent in the Arab world such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, e-mail, bulletin boards, Internet Relay Chat, instant chat, and mobile phone text messaging. Most of these technologies originally were designed to incorporate the ASCII keypads. As a result, Arabic speaking internet users communicate in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic-version text into French/English using the ASCII-forms. To overcome the Arabic letters that do not have an approximate phonetic equivalent in the ASCII script or phones, numerals, that graphically approximate the Arabic letter, are used instead. There is, however, no agreed name for this type of transliteration, yet some people dare to call it Arabic Chat Alphabet while others use the blend word Arabish.

Keywords

Arabic - Computer-Mediated Communication - CMC