Discourse Analysis of Jordanian Online Wedding Invitation Cards During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The current study analyzed the online wedding invitation genres in Jordan during COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to study the generic structures of these invitations and the role of the socio-cultural-religious norms and beliefs in shaping this type of genre. The corpus of 120 online wedding invitation cards was collected from Facebook from March to June 2020. Data were analyzed based on the framework presented by Swales (1990). Six obligatory and one optional move emerged from the analysis of the data. Through data analysis, it has been found that Jordanians’ linguistic behaviors were strongly associated with the religion of Islam and tribalism. Findings from this study have implications for language use and sociolinguistics as well as enhancing the understanding of online wedding invitation practices during a state of a public health emergency.