La Terminologie Arabe de la Telephonie Mobile:Socioterminologie de la Creativite de Iimaginaire Populaire

This paper deals with the sociot erminological phenomena on popular term inological creation concerning the nicknames of mobile telephones in th e Middle East. The mobile telephones’ models are numerous, various and recurrent, and there official names are always composed of four digitals often followed by a letter, which make it hardly retainable (hard to memorize); such as Nokia 7110, Samsung N 620. It is not only for linguistic reasons of transparency and adequation between the name and the named object, but also because of an ancestral tradition; as Arab popular imagination makes use of all its linguistic and extralinguistic resources that Arabic language and culture put in its service to nickname an object that is so cl ose and personnal such as the mobile. Digitals are very abstract and intangible; the popular im agination prefers transparent and affective imaged names formed by the canals of metaphor and metonymy. Theref ore, the names of politicians, stars, songs, places, buildings and animals are all mobili zed and figuratively exploited by Arab consumers in countries like Damascus, Amman, Dubai, and Riyadh etc. to nickname this hi-tech obj ect. Socio-cultural, psycholinguistic and commercial factors clarify the reasons of this process of socio-terminologization.