The material studied in this work consists of examples that illustrate the linguistic response to the taboo of death: death announcements and responses to them in the form of comments offering “condolences”. The word “condolences” is written here in quotation marks, because the reaction in response to death announcements in the Arab world is complex in terms of content and does not limit itself to expressions of sympathy and joining the other person in pain.

The material was obtained from Facebook and consists of written utterances. All speakers were adults. No age criterion was adopted, but it can be assumed that the majority of the utterances were made by young people. Another assumption, also unverified, is that the speakers are people with a higher level of education. The snowball method of accessing participants was used, often resulting in speakers with a similar social profile. Some of the speakers, especially when it comes to the authors of death announcements, are my personal Facebook friends. They are people with higher education in humanities or medicine, aged 30–40, professionally related to academic activity or playing an active role in the life of the community, e.g., as charity activists. However, their class affiliation varies, some come from the country’s political and financial elite, while others, thanks to hard work and personal talent, have risen from the working class. They addressed their posts to their Facebook friends (judging by the privacy settings), so they could access a maximum of about 500–1,000 people on average (based on the author’s number of Facebook friends). An assumption can be made that at least some of those who commented on the posts were people with a similar social profile. The total number of speakers was 774, including 156 men and 618 women. The disproportion in gender was not intended. Post and their comments were randomly selected from the enormous amount of material available. In all the examples, the criterion of informality was met. In the study, utterances containing information about the death of a beloved person or a friend as well as reactions to those announcements were analysed. All utterances were personal and no public posts and information about the death of public figures were ex-amined.