Language variation features of Egyptian online news (on the materials of newspaper "Al-Yawm as-sābiʻ")

Abstract

In this paper, the peculiarities of different language codes functioning in the modern Egyptian media space were investigated based on the materials of the newspaper "Al-Yawm as-sābiʻ" (in social media – Youm7). The subject of the study involves the linguistic and sociolinguistic features of online news texts represented on the official website of the newspaper, as well as on the platforms of Facebook and Instagram. The analysis of more than 200 news items has indicated that the texts are published in both standard and colloquial forms of the Arabic language. It was also found that the choice of language code depends on the resource on which the news is posted, on their form and subject (socio-political, religious, cultural, etc.). It is shown that the form of news (text or different types of creolized texts) on the official website differs from the social networks' content. In particular, it was noted that the form of the text inserted into an iconic image is predominantly utilized in the social networks. This is due to the focus of the aforementioned resources on optimizing the data transmission to attract the recipient's attention. The author also outlined a thematic classification of the studied news. It is noted that all three online resources preserve a common tendency to the thematic and contextual conditionality in the choice of language code. Socio-political news is published in Modern Standard Arabic with minor deviations from the norm, thus, reflecting the specifics of Egyptian Arabic. It is noticed that the news of cultural and entertaining content reveals the usage of Egyptian Arabic, code switching (from the standard to colloquial form of the language), colloquial lexis insertions, lexical interferents from English, switching from colloquial Arabic to English. It is explicated that despite the common features of language variation, each of the three platforms contains a different amount of text and the amount of news about a particular event. The research has shown that the social network Instagram contains the largest number of samples in Egyptian Arabic since this resource focuses primarily on entertaining content.