A Comparative Sociolinguistic Study of Gender Related Differences and Attitudes in the Use of Standard Arabic Speech Forms in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

This study examines the linguistic behaviour of fifty female and forty- nine male undergraduate students at King Saud University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A matched-guise technique with a Semantic Differential Scale Questionnaire (SDSQ) was employed to evaluate speakers’ attitudes towards two guises: a Standard Arabic pronunciation that realized the /q/ in qaf words and a non-Standard Arabic pronunciation that realized the dialectal variant /ɡ/. Respondents’ self-evaluation was also sought as to whether they used the Standard or a non-Standard pronunciation of twelve selected qaf words in everyday communication by a Self-Evaluation (SV) test. Speakers’ responses to three questions based on the social story Min Ahadith Alqura were tape-recorded in a formal interview session and phonemically transcribed. This was used to uncover speakers’ preference for Standard phonological forms. The literature on linguistic gender differences in English speaking communities shows a consistent pattern of linguistic differentiation: English speaking women used more frequently prestigious Standard phonological forms than men from the same socio-economic background. However, sociolinguistic studies of Arab communities show an opposite pattern, that is, men used more Standard forms. More significantly, some researchers have maintained that women utilized non-Standard Arabic features because they were associated with the dialect of urban centers and therefore considered prestigious and conforming to linguistic patterns in English speaking communities. This led me to ask the question: Are there linguistic differences between women and men in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? If yes, to explain their language behavior in relation to well-established methodology that uncovers objectively each gender’s attitudes towards Standard Arabic and non-Standard Arabic features. The data was analyzed quantitatively and subjected to statistical techniques of variance to uncover any significant linguistic gender pattern. The main findings of this study do not reveal any statistical difference in men’s and women’s realization of the /q/ and /ɡ/ variants in qaf words; these co-varied in speech according to the formality of the situation irrespective of gender. Women used significantly more than men non-Standard features of Arabic, that is, non-Standard phonological forms and non-Standard lexis. Female speakers were significantly more verbose and utilized more vocalized fillers (e.g. ah, uhm) in their speech. Code-switching into English was a strategy employed by only women in this sample. Both genders evaluated the Standard guise on more positive traits, that is, competence, personal integrity, and occupational success. The non-Standard guise was rated higher in relation to the social attractiveness traits. Thus, women used non-Standard Arabic forms that were rated unfavourably on a wider variety of positive socio-economic traits, whereas men used more Standard Arabic forms that were rated favourably