The use of Twitter in the Arab world accelerated very strongly at the turn of the 2010s, even before the Arabic writing is possible on this medium in March 2012. Before that date, it is tinkered use (graphics and phonetics) that allowed the use of Twitter as a communication channel in arabic language. These Latin adaptations to the technical constraints imposed by writing are now integrated into strategies related to the use of Arabic language on Twitter.
This is an exploratory research project that aims to identify the forms of adaptations, the specificities of linguistic uses of Arabic and the regionalisms that are detectable from publications on Twitter's feed. The purpose of the research is twofold. From a linguistic point of view, the aim is to detect and to study the impact of twitter's practices in the evolution of the arabic language. From an Info-communication point of view, the aim is to evaluate in which ways linguistic markers help to trace and characterize information flows or to identify communities associated with their diffusion.
Preliminary work consists in developing and validating the relevance of collection methods that meet the challenges of this research, that is to say covering both a geo-linguistic space that is mastered and that offers the possibility of a contextualized terminological analysis.