Analyzing Ramadan Congratulation Facebook Comments in Jordanian Arabic: A Pragmatic Study

Abstract This study examines congratulatory expressions of Facebook users’ comments on Ramadan in Jordan. The study has gathered a total of 832 congratulatory comments in 8 Facebook posts and diagnoses the data theoretically adopting Mey’s theory. By analyzing the data qualitatively and quantitatively, the study categorizes the data based on congratulatory strategies and pragmatic functions utilized in situational contexts. The findings show that congratulating formula strategies form the dominant pragmatically-governed pattern within the dataset amounting to 53.8 % out of all strategies. Expressions of good wishes and expressions of happiness follow with 14 % and 10.2 % respectively. While expressions of compliments, non-verbal language, religious nuances, Ramadan-related welcoming explicits, and jokes constitute the least frequent strategies. The results, overall, reveal that Facebook Jordanian users dominantly depend on contextualized cultural formations and religiously-shared expressions, mirroring the major influence of collective knowledge culturally and religiously following Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts. These findings pinpoint the mode of pre-dominance of traditional discourse of congratulating within Arabic digital communication, combined with growing hybrid forms between customarily cultural expressions and colloquial colloquial phrases and nuances. This paper contributes to the pragmatics of digital Arabic discourse as well as revealing the intricate between language, culture, religion, and values.