Effect of topic on the Arabic language used on social networks and mobile phone communications

This paper focuses on the effects of topic on the Arabic language used in Facebook, Twitter, news sites, blogging sites, and mobile phone messaging. The results presented in this paper are based on a comprehensive study that was carried out using 8,538 text samples from these five forums. The sample topics are categorized into nine categories: political, social, economic, academic, religious, scientific, sports, arts, and others. The effect of topic is analyzed on several Arabic language aspects including the language whether Arabic, English, or mixed; the alphabet whether Arabic, English, or Arabizi; the dialect whether standard, colloquial, or mixed; the use of symbols; the style whether normal, metaphor, cynical, vulgar, or other; and the text cohesion level. This paper shows that there are large differences found in these six language aspects among the nine topic categories. Most notably, standard and refined language is common in serious topics such as religion and politics. Colloquial Arabic dialect and weak cohesion with Arabizi alphabet is common in casual topics such as social and academic topics.