A Linguistic Investigation of Online Suicide Posts in English and Arabic

Abstract

Ever since social media become an outlet for many individuals to share their agonizing thoughts like suicidal ideation, People used to encounter suicide posts of others on different platforms. A suicide post is a piece of writing shared electronically by a poster who decides or desires to end his \ her life for some reason. The principal problem to be handled in this study is the need to point out if these posts in particular have a common framework or not. Moreover, till the time of conducting this investigation, there is no contrastive study about the Arabic suicide posts linguistically as opposed to the English ones. Therefore, this study is a qualitative one intends to investigate the most conspicuous linguistic features of suicide posts in English and Arabic. In order to examine the extent to which these types of posts are different or similar, a comparative approach is adopted. Data are obtained from three diverse online platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram and Wattpad. Based on the work of Prokofyeva (2013), the researcher will read, classify, and describe the data. At the end, the result of this study can provide more information in research concerning suicide posts in linguistics as well as an application of Discourse Analysis to online texts.