Abstract

Arabizi is a trendy language phenomenon utilized by young Arabs to communicate across various social platforms. Young Kuwaitis seem to not be any exception in that regard. This paper aims mainly at investigating the linguistic features of Arabizi as produced by the young generation in Kuwait, and the reasons for which the practice has been persistent amongst the youth community. The main corpus data was collected from spontaneous WhatsApp chats of 35 young Kuwaiti respondents who provided 400 of their e-messages to be linguistically analyzed by the researcher. A digital questionnaire was also implemented to illicit respondents’ responses on the reasons for which young Kuwaitis use Arabizi in their e-messages. Due to the heterogeneity of the spontaneous corpus, supplemental data was provided from a story writing that was sent to the respondents to be re-written in the style they choose when they normally chat on WhatsApp. From a linguistic point of view, the study reveals a number of tendencies that place Arabizi as a unique method of communication with a profile that employs both transcription and transliteration in the way it represents its consonants vs. vowels, Kuwaiti dialectical phoneme shifts and the wide use of extralinguistic features. Intensive code-switching and mixing has also been displayed. The present study also signifies a number of sociolinguistic reasons for which Kuwaiti users of Arabizi employ the script in their e-communication across social platforms.

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