Gender Differences in SMS Code-Switching by Lebanese Undergraduates

• Autores: Loubna Bassam
• Directores de la Tesis: Anthony Pym (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Rovira i Virgili ( España ) en 2017
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: José Santaemilia Ruiz (presid.), Amado Alarcón Alarcón (secret.), Esther Torres Simón (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Humanísticos por la Universidad Rovira i Virgili
• Materias:
  • Lingüística
    • Lingüística aplicada
      • Bilingüismo
  • Ciencia política
    • Sociología política
      • Lenguas
  • Sociología
    • Sociología cultural
      • Lengua y cultura
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en:  hdl.handle.net  TDX 
• Resumen

  • Lebanese society has been always known for its multicultural as well as multilingual interactions, and code-switching has long been a unique feature and natural product of this multilingualism. This study explores gender differences in code-switching in the SMS messages of Lebanese students from different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. It also surveys possible threats to Arabic that come about as a result of this code-switching, mostly characterized by use of Romanized script. With the advent of the globalization associated with embracing various modes of technology, young people have adopted the trend of writing Arabic in Latin characters in social media, as part of their code-switching.

    A corpus of 1680 SMS messages was collected from 58 undergraduates: 34 women and 24 men; there were 1013 messages from women and 667 from men. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted; a questionnaire and an interview were administered.

    The research shows that women code-switch significantly more than men. In addition, men and women have also revealed clear-cut distinctions in terms of the frequency of switches in their messages, in the percentage of Arabic, English, French and other languages in their code-switching messages, and in the percentages of languages used in the messages that have no code-switching. This study also investigates gendered language in terms of intra- and inter-generational code-switching, social class and religion. The findings show that all of these variables are intertwined with gender differences to constitute a unique sociolinguistic phenomenon.

    The most prominent finding would thus be the inherent connection between the presence of women and all the linguistic features that have been analyzed in this study.

    This study also indicates that students have adopted the Romanized script in almost all their SMS messages as well as different aspects of social media; most of them rarely use the Arabic script Accordingly, the language of SMS messages indicates how endangered the Arabic language is nowadays, at least in Lebanon.

    This research tackles many novel areas of research. It could be the only sociolinguistic study that deals with gender differences in SMS code-switching in terms of age, social class, and religion. Further, this study is expected to add to knowledge of written code-switching: the findings will hopefully fill a gap in studies on code-switching between Arabic and English in computer-mediated communication, on the one hand, and on gender differences in SMS code-switching, on the other.