Volume 3 Issue 12 (December 2020) PP. 01-12
DOI 10.35631/IJHPL.312001
Copyright © GLOBAL ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE (M) SDN BHD - All rights reserved
1
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
HUMANITIES, PHILOSOPHY
AND LANGUAGE
(IJHPL)
www.ijhpl.com
GENDERS PATTERNS ON FACEBOOK: A JORDANIAN
SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
Hythem Wanas Al-Sad
1*
, Kamariah Yunus
2
1
Faculty of Languages and Communication, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin
Email: hythemdolat@yahoo.com
2
Faculty of Languages and Communication, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin
Email: kamariah@unisza.edu.my
*
Corresponding Author
Article Info: Abstract:
Article history:
Received date:11.11.2020
Revised date: 20.11.2020
Accepted date: 29.11.2020
Published date: 01.12.2020
To cite this document:
Al-Sad, H. W., & Yunus, K. (2020).
Gender Patterns on Facebook: A
Jordanian Sociolinguistic Perspective.
International Journal of Humanities,
Philosophy and Language, 3 (12), 01-
12.
DOI: 10.35631/IJHPL.312001.
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The emergence of social media has demonstrated impacts on Jordanian males'
and females' culture and language. These impacts highlighted the differences
between women's and men's usage patterns on social media that have been a
subject of interest to scholars. Jordanian culture is bounded by values,
traditions, and norms from Islam and Arabic values. Thus, the present study
aims to figure out gender prototypes on social networking sites, namely
Facebook, taking Jordan society as the norm. It also investigates how much
Fakebook’s use has changed males' and females' social, cultural, and linguistic
behaviors. The study is a mixture of sociolinguistic and anthropological
research as both language and culture are studied. Discourse and thematic
analysis were performed to analyze the collected data from 80 Facebook active
users whose ages range from 19 to 45 (40 male and 40 female). The results
showed the differences between males and females users at different levels.
Females tend to use informal language to comment on females' posts and
formal language to comment on males' posts. Further, most males explicitly
use their real images as profile pictures, while females hide their real pictures.
Females disclose their real names on their profiles just as males, but females
tend to hide their contact information due to privacy concerns. Females and
males are almost the same in using Facebook for social purposes, either in
topics or groups. The results can be interpreted as reflections of Jordanian
culture and social values that shape women's and men's positions and attitudes
in Jordanian communities. This study recommends further research on social
networks, considering other social variables such as education, age, and
geography to pinpoint the exact patterns of users that are relatively diverse
according to the speech communities.