This study aims to examine the speech act of congratulations in the Arabic language on the occasion of 'birthday' among young Arab Jordanians who use Facebook to share social life with each other. The data collected is 855 birthday congratulation notes posted by 100 Jordanian Facebook users. The convenience sampling is being used as research…

This study investigates the effect of Facebook on Arabic language attrition, i.e., decrease in language proficiency, as exhibited in the use of Colloquial instead of Standard Arabic, use of foreign words although Arabic equivalents exist, and committing spelling errors. A sample of Facebook posts and a corpus of spelling errors on Facebook were…

Languages tend to be modified to accommodate for the speakers needs, such as, discussing or dealing with certain topics and domains. An example, university students, in Jordan, modify their own language, being colloquial Arabic, with terms and expressions from the English language in order to interact and adapt to everyday college life. Due to…

This dissertation examines a project to unify sign languages across twenty-two Arab countries. Proponents of the project, mainly pan-Arab governmental bodies with the support of members of the staff at the Al Jazeera satellite network, have framed the project as a human rights effort to advance the welfare of deaf Arab people. They have urged its…

This paper examines the results of two sociolinguistic studies of the Arabic spoken by men and women in Jordan and Syria in terms of sex differentiation in Arabic. The study reported in this paper proposes that the terms "prestigious" and "standard" should not be used interchangeably; accordingly, it reinterprets the previous…

Many English tests based on Western culture are inappropriate for regions where English use differs from that of Europe and North America. In these non-Western settings, it is desirable that English assessments be based on real-world English use. Therefore, identifying tasks of non-Western English language use is a beginning step in developing…