(Im) Politeness and Gender in the Arabic Discourse of Social Media Network Websites: Facebook as a Norm

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the differences and similarities in the ways men and women use (im)politeness strategies in communicating “online” in the Arabic discourse of social media network websites like Facebook as well as the role of the topic the interlocutors talk about in the use of (im)politeness strategies. In addition, the study investigates the differences between the men-men, women-women, women-men communication in the Arabic discourse of social media network website, Facebook. For the purposes of this study, a corpus of online Arabic texts were collected from some public web pages of the most popular TV show programs on some of the most well-liked social media network websites such as Facebook over a period of four months (from September 2012- December 2012). The obtained data were studied quantitatively and qualitatively. Many studies have been conducted on cross-gender differences especially in the computer mediated communication CMC, but none so far has focused on the gender differences and (im)politeness in the Arabic discourse of social media network websites although there is a huge number of Arabic users of such websites. The present study, therefore, attempts to fill in the gap in the literature.