Gender and language boundaries in the Arab world: Current issues and perspectives (original) (raw)
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Arabic, like many other gendered languages, displays a grammatical and semantic gender bias that led some researchers to describe it as "androcentric" in nature. Yet, while sexism in modern standard English has been the subject of a lot of academic research work over the past forty years, little attention has been given to linguistic gender bias in Arabic, and none, to the best of the researcher's knowledge, to vernacular Cairene Arabic. The objective of this paper is to investigate and provide a linguistic description of the andocentric nature of Cairene Arabic both on the grammatical and lexical levels. The paper shows the heavy male domination that characterises Cairene Arabic, as illustrated in the various morphological, lexical and syntactic features. Then the paper examines to what extent the "abstract advantage" given to men in Arabic language reflects as well as enhances "the physical advantage" men are given in the Egyptian community. The paper finally shows the difficulty facing any proposal of gender-neutral vocabulary as was done in English.
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The studies of differences in language used by males and females appear mainly to have been focused on the spoken word and rarely on writing. This paper examines some linguistic differences that exist in male and female writing styles of Arabic novels. Some classes of lexical and syntactic features that identify the author’s gender are specified. The paper finds significant differences in the frequent use of some features such as colour, tag questions, verb vs. noun in initiating paragraphs, slang, taboo and euphemistic terms. inparticular, males tend to use many more nouns in initial paragraphs compared to females who tend to use fewer of this category. Females are more conservative in using sex-related words whether implicitly or explicitly. Females generally speaking seem to be more atten-tive and more likely to pay specific attention to detail, which in turn influences their style. Finally, anoticeable correlation between the characteristics of male-female writing and the litera...
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