IJAL Reading Tools

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has witnessed a meteoric rise that not only reshaped people’s lives but also their language. In its early days, CMC was seen as an impersonal medium, effective in task-oriented communication but inadequate in socio-emotional conversations, because it lacks nonverbal cues. Against the development of CMC and the necessity of nonverbal information in communicative effectiveness, CMC offered its own version of nonverbal cues; hence the inception of emoticons that are mainly used to compensate facial expressions in face-to-face conversations and help CMC users to express their emotions in a fast brief way. Regarding the widespread use of social network sites and the development of CMC mediums, the use of emoticons has drawn the interests of many researchers. The current research adopts a Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis approach to emoticon use. The study examines the role of gender as a social factor involved in nonverbal cues variation, focusing on the use of emoticons. Against the speculative claim that Arabic males and females differ in their linguistic choices, the analysis reveals that the role of gender was blurred in relation to emoticon use. Accordingly, gender considerations fade away in the Arabic Tunisian e-discourse.