The Speech of Social Media Influencers in Najd: Introducing a New Source of Sociolinguistic Data

This study explores using the speech of Najdi social media influencers in Snapchat and TikTok as a source of sociolinguistic production data. Saudis in general, Najdis in particular, post their daily life vlogs on these apps building a huge volume of recorded speech in the local dialects. This type of content has been examined to introduce the possibility of using it as a source of production data alongside/instead of the sociolinguistic interview. The speech of 18 social media influencers, representing three sub-dialects of Najd, has been transcribed and analyzed to test whether it is natural and not mostly formal. The variables have been ranked according to Labov’s (1972) classification of speakers’ awareness: stereotype, marker and indicator. It was found in this study that, similar to data elicited from the interview, social media influencers tend to use their local variants which are classified as markers and/or indicators, and they avoid using stereotypes. In some social settings, the social media influencers were even more spontaneous than they would be in an interview. The study suggests that the speech of social media influencers in Najd is an easily accessible, larger, and better-quality source of sociolinguistic production data.