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Article In: Register Studies: Online-First Articles

Surveying native speakers to find the proportions of registers used in Levantine Arabic

ORCiD logo with link | Iowa State University
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Abstract
Corpora consisting of Levantine Arabic, the dialects spoken in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, include a narrow range of registers and are rarely based on a careful domain description, limiting their ability to represent the target domain. The purpose of this study is to describe the proportions of registers used within Levantine Arabic by conducting a Parameters of Language Use Survey ( (2024). What are university students doing with language?: A proportional description of student processing mode and register use in an American university. Linguistics and Education, 831. 101336. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), so that subsequent corpora can better represent the Levantine dialects. The registers used (e.g., conversations, song lyrics, audio/video sharing) and their frequency were identified. As expected for a traditionally oral variety of Arabic, much language use consisted of conversation (61.1%). Another 16.4% consisted of digital language use, most of which was written, reflecting a noteworthy change precipitated by the advent of Web 2.0. Results can be used to compare varieties of Arabic including MSA, and inform research and corpus design.
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.The Process of Describing the Target Domain of Levantine Arabic
    • 2.1Determining a Language’s Most frequent Registers: Diary- and Survey-based Studies
    • 2.2The Target Domain of Levantine Arabic
    • 2.3The Importance of Representativeness and the Proportions of Registers in a Domain
    • 2.4Research Offering Insight into the most Frequent Registers in Levantine Arabic
    • 2.5Rationale
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Identifying the Domain Boundaries of Levantine Arabic
    • 3.2Research Site, Sampling Procedure, and Participants for the Survey
    • 3.3Data Collection Procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Results from the Main Survey
    • 4.2Results from the Final Survey
    • 4.3Results from the Observations
    • 4.4Results from the Application Tracker
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Insights into Levantine Arabic
    • 5.2How Results can Guide Corpus Creation, Selection, and Evaluation
    • 5.3How Results could be Used to Compare Varieties of Arabic
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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