Surveying native speakers to find the proportions of registers used in Levantine Arabic

Corpora consisting of Levantine Arabic, the dialects spoken in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, include a narrow range of registers and are rarely based on a careful domain description, limiting their ability to represent the target domain. The purpose of this study is to describe the proportions of registers used within Levantine Arabic by conducting a Parameters of Language Use Survey ( Hashimoto 2024 ), so that subsequent corpora can better represent the Levantine dialects. The registers used (e.g., conversations, song lyrics, audio/video sharing) and their frequency were identified. As expected for a traditionally oral variety of Arabic, much language use consisted of conversation (61.1%). Another 16.4% consisted of digital language use, most of which was written, reflecting a noteworthy change precipitated by the advent of Web 2.0. Results can be used to compare varieties of Arabic including MSA, and inform research and corpus design.