New means of communication and the development of digital writing are significantly changing the way people use Arabic in its written form. Electronic communication through the Internet combines features of oral expression with those of writing, thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of language production. Indeed, the emergence of the Internet has encouraged new genres, such as digital literature and cyber-literature, as well as the creation of new platforms that host both traditional and innovative ways of writing literary texts. These genres have favored creative developments both in terms of textual structure and the topics covered. This article provides an overview of these new literary tendencies, and analyzes the use of the dialectal forms over Standard Arabic, a phenomenon that is a major feature of such texts.

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