Challenges of Arabic in Smartphone’s Applications: A Field Study on Dammam Intermediate, Secondary and Collegiate Schools in the Eastern Province

Abstract

This study aims to highlight the multiple challenges that the Arabic language faces in light of the use of smart phone applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media that have transformed the world into a small village with no controls for communication between its users except the terms of use imposed by the applications themselves. Given that these challenges are a face of the linguistic identity crisis with all its complexities; We preferred to choose this title "The Challenges of the Arabic Language in Smartphone Applications" to be an area of ​​research, and a questionnaire was applied to a random sample of Saudi society (intermediate, secondary and university levels), which numbered (261) samples. Relying on the descriptive analytical correlative approach that provides a correct and realistic understanding of the described situation, showing its characteristics, and then describing the study variables represented by the challenges of linguistic identity, while relying on the social approach: To reveal the impact of smart phone applications in weaken the Arabic language in Saudi society, the research concluded several results, the most important of which are:

The Arabic language faces many hybrid challenges in dangerous that threaten its identity.

-Diversity of social media, activities that are the preferred method in the first place for all stages is WhatsApp.

The spread of the colloquial dialect among young people and adolescents, both verbally and in writing, due to the lack of Arabic culture among them, and this constitutes an unknown danger to the fluency of the Arabic language.

-The results indicate that there are those who are ashamed of using the Arabic language, and find in it a face of backwardness and primitiveness, compared to English in which they find a facet of development, progress and civilization.