المجلة الجزائرية للأبحاث والدراسات
Volume 6, Numéro 4, Pages 268-281
2023-10-31

Codeswitching And Borrowing On Algerian Social Networking Sites: The Case Of Facebook

Authors : Soufi Benyoub . Negadi Mohammed Nassim .

Abstract

The rapid rise of social media use among Algerian individuals has created an unparalleled opportunity to study how Algerians reflect their linguistic practices on computer-mediated communication platforms. The aim of this paper is to explore and analyse Algerian language practices on Facebook, mainly language use related to the varieties already widely used in the Algerian linguistic landscape (Algerian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and French). In order to accomplish this objective, a sample of two hundred contributions (27 posts and 173 comments) were collected from two sources: (1) a Facebook group and (2) a Facebook page. Conversational Analysis and language frequency distribution were used to scrutinize the collected data. The findings revealed that Algerian Arabic is the primary mode of communication in the studied sample, and codeswitching practices appear infrequently in the composed corpus.

Keywords

Algerian Dialect, CMC, Codeswitching, Diglossia, Facebook.