When Does Communication Become Culture?

Language, Memes, and the Making of Identity in the Digital Arab World

Cultural Essay | Prince Researcher

Abstract

Every culture begins as communication. It begins as the repeated, shared exchange of meaning between people who inhabit a common world. But not every act of communication becomes culture. This essay examines the conditions under which communication crosses that threshold. When it stops being a message and starts being a mirror. When it stops passing information and starts forging identity. Two phenomena in Saudi Arabia serve as the principal case studies. The first is Arabizi, the hybrid script of English letters and Arabic numerals that Arab teenagers invented in the 1990s to communicate on early digital devices. The second is the rise of a distinctly Saudi meme culture in the social media era. Together, they illuminate a process that is both ancient and strikingly contemporary: the transformation of constraint into creativity, and of creativity into community.

1. Introduction

Language is the original technology of belonging. Before architecture, law, or religion, human communities distinguished themselves through the particular sounds, rhythms, and symbols they used to communicate. To speak in a certain way was and remains a declaration of membership.

But language is not fixed. It is always in motion, always being shaped by the pressures of contact, technology, power, and play. In the moments of most intense pressure, when communities are confronted with new tools or new realities that their inherited languages cannot easily accommodate, something extraordinary sometimes happens. Out of the friction between what exists and what is needed, a new form of expression is born. And sometimes that new form becomes something more than a practical solution. It becomes a cultural signature. A way of marking who you are, where you belong, and what generation you inhabit.

This essay traces that process through two Saudi examples separated by roughly two decades but connected by a common dynamic: the creative response of young people to conditions of linguistic constraint or opportunity. The first is Arabizi. The second is Saudi meme culture.

The central question is deceptively simple: when does a way of communicating become a culture?

2. Theoretical Framework: The Passage from Communication to Culture

2.1 The Meme as Cultural Gene

The conceptual bridge between communication and culture was built, somewhat unexpectedly, by a biologist. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term meme, derived from the Greek mimema, meaning "imitated thing," to describe the cultural counterpart to the biological gene. Just as genes replicate and evolve through biological inheritance, Dawkins argued, memes replicate and evolve through cultural transmission. Ideas, behaviors, fashions, and catchphrases pass from mind to mind, mutating slightly with each transmission, surviving or dying based on their capacity to resonate.

While scholars have debated the limits of memetics as a scientific framework, the concept remains useful as a metaphor for understanding how cultural forms spread, mutate, and endure. The term "meme" was extended to the internet context by Mike Godwin in 1993, in reference to how ideas proliferate through early online communities including message boards, Usenet groups, and email. Today, the internet meme is perhaps the purest contemporary manifestation of Dawkins' original concept.

The deeper implication of the framework matters more than any single meme. Cultures are built on successful memes. A culture is, in essence, the accumulated repertoire of shared replicators. The jokes, phrases, references, gestures, and habits that a community recognizes as its own. Communication becomes culture when its products achieve this shared, self-reinforcing quality. When a way of speaking or writing is recognized by a community as ours.

2.2 Stuart Hall and the Circuit of Culture

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued that culture is not a thing but a process. Specifically, a circuit of encoding and decoding in which meaning is produced not by senders alone but through the active interpretive participation of receivers. A message only becomes cultural when it is decoded within a shared framework of meaning. When both sender and receiver inhabit the same universe of reference.

This framework is useful for understanding what transforms communication into culture. When a new form of expression, a script, a meme format, a phrase, is understood immediately and intuitively by a large number of people sharing a common context, it has entered the circuit of culture. It no longer needs to be explained. It is simply recognized.

2.3 Identity and the Semiotic Community

Sociolinguist Dell Hymes developed the concept of the speech community. A group defined not by geography or ethnicity but by shared knowledge of the rules for using language in social interaction. A speech community shares not just vocabulary and grammar but norms of appropriateness. When to be formal, when to be playful, what jokes land, what references resonate.

Arabizi and Saudi meme culture each created distinct speech communities. Groups whose shared knowledge of a particular communicative form generated a sense of collective identity that transcended any individual message. To know Arabizi in the 1990s was to signal membership in a specific generational and technological cohort. To understand a Saudi meme today is to demonstrate fluency in a shared cultural literacy.

The passage from communication to culture is the moment when a communicative form becomes the property of a community rather than the tool of an individual. When it is no longer learned consciously but absorbed as second nature. No longer chosen deliberately but deployed automatically as a mark of belonging.

3. Arabizi: When Teenagers Invented a Language

3.1 The Technological Constraint

The story of Arabizi begins not with creativity but with constraint. When personal computers, early internet chat rooms, and mobile devices arrived in the Arab world during the 1990s, they brought a fundamental limitation: Arabic script was poorly supported across many popular consumer devices, chat platforms, and mobile phones.

During the 1990s, most Arab countries witnessed an increasing dominance of English across technological devices and realms, including online chats, SMS, and mobile phones. Non-Latin scripts were unsupported or poorly rendered on many popular platforms, and the practical means to communicate digitally was through the Latin alphabet. Arabic speakers were effectively pushed to develop a means of writing Arabic using the tools available to them.

This is a remarkable origin story. A generation of young Arabs, confronted with the inability of the machines available to them to render their own language, did not simply switch to English or fall silent. They invented something new.

3.2 The System They Built

The solution was elegant and, in retrospect, inevitable. Write Arabic sounds using the Latin letters that corresponded to them, and devise visual substitutes for the Arabic letters that had no Latin equivalent.

The word Arabizi is itself a portmanteau. A blend of Arabi and Inglizi, the Arabic word for English, collapsed into a single term that named exactly what it was: a hybrid. Arabizi uses numerals to stand in for Arabic consonants that have no close Latin equivalent. The numeral 7 represents the Arabic letter ح (Haa). The numeral 3 stands for ع (ayn), 5 or 7' for خ (kha), 6 for ط (ta), 8 for غ (ghayn), and 9 for ص (sad).

A morning greeting, صباح الخير, became 9aba7 2l5air. To those outside the system, these strings of letters and numbers were incomprehensible. To those inside, they were perfectly legible and more than that, they were stylish.

3.3 More Than Necessity: The Cool Factor

Here is where the story becomes culturally significant. Arabizi did not persist simply because it was necessary. Even after Arabic-capable keyboards and operating systems became widely available, young Arabs, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, continued to use Arabizi. They chose it.

Because it had become something more than a workaround. It had become an identity marker. To write in Arabizi in the late 1990s and early 2000s was to signal that you were young, technologically fluent, connected to global digital culture, and at ease in both Arabic and English simultaneously. Arabic speakers use Arabizi because young people feel it is faster, more informal, trendier, and easier to type than formal Arabic. It was, in the language of the time, simply cool.

This is the crucial transition. The moment a communicative tool becomes a style. When young Saudis chose Arabizi not because their phone required it but because it made them feel a certain way, modern, bilingual, part of a generation, the script had become culture.

3.4 Arabizi as Generational Signature

Every generation creates its own linguistic signature. The slang, the references, the tonal registers that mark it as distinct from what came before. For Saudi teenagers of the 1990s, Arabizi was that signature. To receive a message written in Arabizi from a friend was to participate in a shared identity that your parents did not share and could not easily read.

This generational dimension is essential to the transition from communication to culture. Culture is always, in part, a form of boundary-drawing. A set of practices that defines who belongs and who does not. Arabizi drew a generational boundary with unusual sharpness because it was genuinely illegible to those not initiated into it. It was a secret language hidden in plain sight.

Arabizi also allowed expressiveness through capital letters and repeated characters that is difficult to convey in Arabic script. Capital letters for emphasis, repeated vowels for exaggeration (7elwaaaaaaa!), the heightened vernacular that is essential to internet communication in all languages. In this sense, Arabizi was not just a transliteration of Arabic. It was a new dialect, shaped by the norms and affordances of digital communication.

3.5 The Bridge Platforms: Forums, MSN, BBM, and the Normalization of Arabizi

Between the early Arabizi experiments on IRC chat rooms and the meme culture that emerged on Twitter and Instagram, a transitional era matters enormously. And it begins earlier than MSN.

Before MSN Messenger arrived in Saudi homes, there were forums. Maktoob, the Arab world's first major web portal and email service, launched in 1998 and became the early hub of Arabic digital life. Saudi-specific forums hosted discussions on everything from religion and culture to football and technology. These early online communities were the first spaces where Arabizi was normalized not as a workaround among two friends but as the shared language of thousands of strangers. On these forums, the rules of digital Arabic communication were written collectively, without anyone declaring them. Arabizi simply became the register in which things happened online.

MSN Messenger in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and BlackBerry Messenger in the mid-to-late 2000s, extended and deepened this normalization. MSN Messenger was where Saudi teenagers spent their evenings. BBM was where they built their most active social circles. Both ran on Latin-script keyboards. Both rewarded speed and informality. Both made Arabizi not just functional but fluent.

The communicative habits formed across forums, MSN, and BBM, the code-switching, the ironic register, the comfort with hybridity, became the default mode for an entire generation. When Twitter and Instagram arrived in Saudi Arabia in the early 2010s, that generation did not need to learn a new way of communicating digitally. They simply brought what they already knew into a new and more public arena. Arabizi grew up. And when it did, it became the substrate on which Saudi meme culture was built.

3.6 The Anxiety It Produced

Precisely because Arabizi had become culturally powerful, it produced anxiety in equal measure. Arabic language scholars, educators, and cultural conservatives worried that the young generation was drifting from the classical script. That the phonetic ambiguities of Arabizi and the wholesale borrowing of the Latin alphabet represented a form of cultural capitulation.

There is a pronounced fear that Arabizi will weaken the Arabic language or even replace it, threatening Arab identity and the Arab value system. These anxieties are themselves evidence of Arabizi's cultural power. A communicative practice that was merely convenient would not provoke such intense concern. The fact that educators, clerics, and cultural guardians felt it necessary to warn against Arabizi confirmed that it had achieved something significant. It had become a site of cultural contestation, which is precisely where culture lives.

4. Saudi Meme Culture: The Mirror of a Generation

4.1 The Emergence of a Distinctly Saudi Humor Ecosystem

The second transformation from communication to culture occurred with the emergence of Saudi meme culture, roughly from the mid-2000s onward, accelerating dramatically with the spread of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok in the Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia developed one of the most distinctive and prolific meme ecosystems in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia has one of the youngest populations in the region, one of the highest rates of social media penetration globally, and a social context in which public spaces for cultural expression have historically been limited. Digital platforms became disproportionately important as arenas for humor, commentary, and communal processing of shared experience.

Saudi memes draw from a deep reservoir of shared cultural reference. The particular textures of family life, the rhythms of Ramadan and Eid, the vocabulary of Gulf Arabic dialect, the experience of heat, hospitality, traffic, bureaucracy, and rapid social change. They are frequently untranslatable not because they are linguistically complex but because they are culturally specific. To understand a Saudi meme fully is to have lived inside the cultural context it encodes.

4.2 What Saudi Memes Actually Look Like

The cultural specificity of Saudi memes is best understood through examples. During Ramadan, a particular ecosystem of memes emerges annually. Images of someone pretending to sleep through the day to avoid hunger, or of the exact moment the Maghrib call to prayer sounds and the dining table transforms from empty to full. These are not merely jokes. They are rituals, performed digitally, by millions of people experiencing the same moment simultaneously.

During school exam season, memes about the Saudi curriculum, the pressure of university admissions, and the particular agony of mathematics and sciences circulate as a form of collective catharsis. Students who have never met each other share the same meme format because they share the same lived experience.

Saudi football memes occupy another distinct category. When the Saudi national team defeated Argentina at the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the meme response was immediate, massive, and globally visible. The humor was not only celebratory. It was also self-aware. Saudis memed their own shock. They memed the world's confusion. They memed the moment before the world had finished reacting to it. This is the speed and sophistication of a mature meme culture. It does not just respond to events. It processes them communally, in real time, at scale.

Family gathering memes reflect the social texture of Saudi life with particular precision. The specific characters who appear at every extended family dinner, the questions aunts ask about marriage and employment, the gap between formal family presentation and private family reality. These memes are untranslatable not because of language but because of intimacy. They require having been in those rooms.

4.3 The Bilingual Meme: Arabizi Grown Up

A defining feature of contemporary Saudi meme culture is its bilingualism. The fluid movement between Arabic script, Arabizi transliteration, and English that characterizes the communication style of a generation raised in both languages. Meme captions in Arabizi, visual formats borrowed from global internet culture but filled with Gulf Arabic content, and the constant code-switching between registers, formal fusha, Gulf dialect, and English loanwords, create a hybrid cultural product that is simultaneously local and global.

This bilingualism is the direct descendant of the Arabizi experiments of the 1990s, matured through MSN and BBM, and now operating at full scale on social media. The teenagers who invented 9aba7 2l5air on IRC chat rooms are now in their thirties and forties. The communicative habits they forged, comfort with hybridity, fluency across scripts, the ironic deployment of mixed registers, are embedded in the meme culture their successors are producing. Culture is cumulative. What one generation invents as a workaround becomes, for the next, simply the way things are done.

4.4 Memes as Social Commentary

Perhaps the most significant dimension of Saudi meme culture is its role as a vehicle for social commentary. In contexts where formal public discourse is constrained, humor operates as a pressure valve and a mirror simultaneously. A meme can say what a news article cannot. Not because it evades detection but because the indirection of humor creates a kind of plausible deniability, and because its velocity of circulation means it has reached millions before any response is possible.

Memes about Saudi daily life, the experience of rapid social change, the generational tensions between tradition and modernity, the absurdities of bureaucracy, the pleasures and pressures of life in the Kingdom, function as a distributed form of social journalism. They document, in real time, the texture of Saudi experience in a way that no single institution could capture or curate.

This documentary function is a mark of cultural maturity. When a form of communication is used not just to amuse but to process, record, and transmit collective experience, it has fully crossed the threshold into culture.

4.5 The Global-Local Dialectic

Saudi meme culture illustrates a broader dynamic in contemporary digital culture: the tension and synthesis between global formats and local content. The dominant meme formats, the image macro, the reaction GIF, the video caption, the duet, are global. The content that fills them, the references to Saudi family dynamics, Gulf dialect idioms, the cultural grammar of the Hajj season or the school year, is intensely local.

This global-local dialectic is itself a cultural product of globalization. A generation that grew up on international media and digital platforms but whose emotional and social life is rooted in a specific place has developed the capacity to move fluidly between global forms and local meanings. The meme is the medium in which that fluency is most visibly exercised.

5. The Communication-to-Culture Framework

Drawing from the theoretical framework and the two Saudi case studies, five conditions explain when communication crosses into culture. Together, they form what this essay calls the Communication-to-Culture Framework: a model for understanding how any communicative form, in any society, crosses the threshold from shared tool to shared identity.

Condition 1: Repetition Within a Community. A single act of communication, however striking, does not create culture. Culture requires repetition. The same form, phrase, gesture, or format used by many people over time, accumulating shared meaning with each iteration. Arabizi became culture through millions of messages exchanged over a decade. Saudi memes become culture through their constant production, circulation, and variation across platforms.

Condition 2: Shared Recognition Without Explanation.

Culture is what does not need to be explained.

When a new form of communication reaches the point where members of a community understand it instantly, without glossary, without tutorial, without context, it has become cultural property. The Arabizi reader who saw 7 and immediately heard ح in their mind, without conscious translation, had crossed into cultural fluency.

Condition 3: Identity Marking. Communication becomes culture when it serves as a marker of membership. When the way you express something signals not just what you mean but who you are. Arabizi was, above all, a generational identity marker. Saudi meme culture is a regional and generational identity marker. To be fluent in it is to demonstrate membership in a specific community of experience and reference.

Condition 4: Creative Variation on a Shared Template. Cultural forms are distinguished from mere conventions by their generativity, their capacity to produce endless variation within a recognizable framework. Arabizi was generative. Saudi memes are generative by definition. Each new iteration is both a repetition of the structure and an innovation in the content. This generativity is what keeps cultural forms alive. They are not fixed texts but open templates.

Condition 5: The Capacity to Provoke Anxiety in Guardians of Existing Culture. A communicative form becomes culturally significant when the guardians of the existing cultural order feel threatened by it. The linguistic anxiety produced by Arabizi was evidence of its power, not its weakness. When something is merely amusing or convenient, it is ignored by cultural authorities. When it is perceived as a threat, it becomes real.

6. Conclusion: The Unfinished Sentence

Culture is never finished. Every cultural form, every language, script, joke, and ritual, is a point in a process of ongoing transformation, shaped by the pressures of the present and the inheritances of the past.

Arabizi was born of a constraint. Arabic script was poorly supported on early digital devices. From that constraint came a creative act, then a generational identity, then a cultural archive. It matured within the intimate social networks of MSN and BBM. It became the substrate on which contemporary Saudi meme culture is partly built. The hybrid, code-switching, bilingual fluency that Arabizi pioneered in the 1990s is the natural linguistic register of the generation that produces and consumes memes today.

Saudi meme culture, in turn, is a living laboratory for studying how communication becomes culture in real time. Every meme that circulates, is modified, and circulates again is a small step in cultural evolution. Every format that becomes recognizable, every phrase that enters the collective vocabulary, and every shared joke that no longer needs explanation is a moment in the transformation of communication into culture.

What these two phenomena teach us is that culture is not made by institutions, elites, or deliberate acts of cultural policy. It is made, as it has always been, by communities under pressure. By people who need to say something that existing tools cannot quite express and who, together, invent the tools they need. The invention becomes a habit. The habit becomes a norm. The norm becomes a culture.

And somewhere in that sequence, always a little earlier than we expect, the communication becomes something more than communication. It becomes who we are.

Whether AI-generated communication eventually becomes culture will depend on the same five conditions that shaped Arabizi and memes: repetition, shared recognition, identity marking, creative variation, and the capacity to provoke anxiety among the guardians of existing cultural forms. If AI-assisted communication meets those conditions at scale, the Communication-to-Culture Framework suggests it will not merely be a tool. It will become a culture. The framework developed in this essay does not resolve that question. But it provides the terms in which it should be asked.

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