[Research Notes] Utilizing Frequency Studies of Arabic Vocabulary for Area Studies of the Arab Region: A Preliminary Analysis of Political and Social Media Texts, Using Existing Corpora and an Original Dataset

The purpose of this paper is to examine how frequency studies of Arabic vocabulary can contribute to the field of Area Studies of the Arab Region, and to explore the potential of this research method based on a preliminary analysis of media Arabic texts on political and social issues. In the Arab world, comprising the member states of the Arab League, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is widely used as the common written language. However, regional variations of vocabulary usage in MSA have not been sufficiently studied. This paper hypothesizes that differences in political systems and other factors may lead to regional variation in vocabulary choice and frequency in media discourse in MSA. First, the paper provides an overview of corpus-based studies in English and Japanese, reviews existing Arabic corpora, such as arabiCorpus and Arabic Gigaword, and highlights current challenges, particularly the limited representation of media from Gulf countries. Next, it reports on a preliminary study in which an original dataset was created from major newspapers of a typical republic, Egypt, and a typical Gulf monarchy, Saudi Arabia, followed by vocabulary collection and analysis. Through this preliminary study, several issues specific to Arabic, such as homographs, diverse verb conjugations, and multiple plurality patterns, were identified, along with potential solutions using morphological analysis tools. Overall, by adapting corpus-based methodologies and constructing an original dataset, this study demonstrates the feasibility of exploring linguistic and social differences within the Arab world through vocabulary frequency analysis. Future research will aim to substantiate the feasibility of vocabulary frequency analysis as a methodological tool in Area Studies of the Arab Region through concrete case studies.