Nonverbal Communication and Emojis Usage in Arabic Tweets: A Cross-Cultural Study

Abstract

People spend most of their time communicating their thoughts, ideas, attitudes, and emotions on social media platforms like Twitter, however, an important mode of communication as the nonverbal component which requires visual and audible cues is not allowed due to the nature of these text-based platforms. The aim of this research is to discover the alternative ways Arabs use across different dialects to compensate for the absence of the nonverbal component. To be able to discover that the researchers collected a corpus of tweets written in the Arabic language by using python through the Twitter application programming interface (API). The results can be summed up as follows: emojis helped Arabs to communicate their facial expressions and the top used emoji across the different dialects was Face with Tears of Joy, it was also apparent that the top used emojis reflected the universal emotions, regarding the usage of hand gestures, Egyptian dialect came in the first place and Emirati dialect in the second place. Prosodic features such as the tone and loudness of the voice are expressed by the mean of character repetition, Punctuation usage across the Arabic dialects was limited, and Lebanese seemed to use them the most, Arabs tend to replace punctuation marks with emojis, finally, Arabs used vocal expressions like Interjections to communicate their affective state.