'PLEASE' SEES 80% RISE ON TWITTER ARABIC

Arabic Coffee being served to guests.

The introduction of 280-character on Twitter last year has revealed the true character of Arab tweeples. There has been an 80% rise in the use of the word 'Please' and a 50% rise in the use of the word 'Excuse Me' in Arabic tweets, according to Twitter.

If you are familiar with Arab culture, you'd know that Arab hospitality is renowned for its warmth. Guests are honored in most of the Arab communities contrary to the media-created perception that have turned all good Arab people into a crazy bunch of rabble rousers and trouble makers.

And Arabs are generally polite. The sentence may sound like it's straight out of Ripley's Believe It or Not. Believe me, it's not.

Culture, tradition, and religion play an important role in an Arab's daily life, and all direct Arabs toward being polite and to be a good host. Even the three Abrahamic religions of the Middle East stress in politeness and hospitality. And now in this digital world, we have credible proof.

Twitter in a statement says: "It’s been a year since Twitter introduced the 280-character limit to the platform from 140 characters. One year later, Twitter has released data surrounding the impact of the 280-character limit.

"In the past year, the language used across the world has evolved. When analyzing seven languages, Twitter found that since the doubling of the character limit, there has been a rise in the use of words such as ‘please’ (+54%) and ‘thank you’ (+22%). In Arabic, there’s been an 83%, 56%, 44% and 30% rise in the use of الرجاء (please), لو سمحت (excuse me), شكرا (thank you), and أرجوك (please) respectively.

"The use of abbreviations has also declined in favor of proper words. English abbreviations such as ‘gr8’ (-36%), ‘b4’ (-13%) and ‘sry’ (-5%) declined in favor of ‘great’ (+32%) ‘before’ (+70%), and ‘sorry’ (+31%).

"The new data revealed that it's easier to Tweet and Twitter is still brief. The most common length of Tweets remains small — with 140 characters it was 34 characters in English and 30 characters in Arabic, and with 280 characters it is 33 characters in English and still 30 characters in Arabic. Historically, 9% of English Tweets and 4% of Arabic Tweets hit the 140-character limit. This reflected the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in editing to fit within the limit.

"With the expanded 280 character count one year later, about 1% of Tweets in both English and Arabic are hitting the 280-character limit. 12% and 5% of English and Arabic Tweets sent after the expanded 280 character count are over 140 characters respectively. Globally, Twitter saw 6% of all Tweets over 140 characters and 3% of Tweets over 190 characters. This indicates that less work is needed to fit thoughts into Tweets and short Tweets remain the norm.

"In addition, more questions and conversations are taking place on the platform. The number of Tweets with a question mark ‘?’ has increased by 30% and overall, Tweets are receiving more replies," says the micro-blogging company.