A Sociolinguistic Perspective to Arabic and Arabs Virtual Communities with Special Reference to the Shi’a as a Religious Minority in the Arab World

Abstract

Arabic, which is the fifth world language with regard to the number of speakers, geographical spread, and socio-literary prestige (Weber, 1997), similar to all other languages whose orthographical system is not based on Latin symbols has been subject to various types of changes resulted from the language contact with English as the default language used in the computer mediated communication supported by the various tools of the modern technology which represent the most prominent hallmark of our new age of globalization. This paper presents a sociolinguistic account to the language contact between English and Arabic on the internet. It discusses the sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations in the Arab world that led to and resulted from this language contact predicting a new phase of Arabic in the forthcoming decades. It investigates, moreover, the sociolinguistic grounds of the social interaction within and between the Arab virtual communities on the internet. The religious minority of the Shi’a in the Arab world has been selected as the specified ethnic and religious group of investigation. The religious, social, and cultural connotation of the interaction occur in their virtual communities have been investigated together with their relation to the other Arab virtual communities.