How Well Do Tweets Represent Sub-Dialects of Egyptian Arabic?
Mai Mohamed Eida, Mayar Nassar, Jonathan Dunn · 2024
How well does naturally-occurring digital text, such as tweets, represent sub-dialects of Egyptian Arabic (EA)?This paper focuses on two EA sub-dialects: Cairene Egyptian Arabic (CEA) and Sa'idi Egyptian Arabic (SEA).We use morphological markers from groundtruth dialect surveys as a distance measure across four geo-referenced datasets.Results show that CEA markers are prevalent as expected in CEA geo-referenced tweets, while SEA markers are limited across SEA georeferenced tweets.SEA tweets instead show a prevalence of CEA markers and higher usage of Modern Standard Arabic.We conclude that corpora intended to represent sub-dialects of EA do not accurately represent sub-dialects outside of the Cairene variety.This finding calls into question the validity of relying on georeferenced tweets alone to represent dialectal differences.