Volume 2008, Issue 190

This issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language , devoted entirely to topics in language and gender in the Mediterranean region, encompasses a number of excellent contributions on language and gender in Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, France, and the diaspora, within a multidisciplinary perspective bringing together the insights, methodologies, and concerns of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, literary theory, history, and gender studies.

This article includes two parts: the first part is a review of the work which is being done in Valencia in the field of gender, sex(uality), and language. The land of Valencia (the old “Kingdom of Valencia”), once an independent political entity, is now part of today's constitutional Spain, and its history is a dynamic mixture of religious, cultural, and political traditions. In Valencia two languages and cultures coexist: Spanish (as the dominant language) and Catalan (or “Valencian,” in a situation of diglossia or “asymmetric bilingualism”). While both are Romance languages and have important linguistic similarities, Spanish and Catalan differ significantly as to their legal situation, political status, literary tradition, or degree of (in)formality. The second part of the article presents the discussions of a questionnaire on sex-related language (SL), held with two groups of undergraduates at the University of Valencia whose native languages were, respectively, Spanish and Catalan. Students discuss their ideas of what “sex(uality)” is; the texts or communicative situations in which they use SL; the sex-related words or expressions which they are (un)likely to use; how they are affected by SL (whether they are offended, embarrassed, etc.); their attitudes towards certain SL manifestations (dirty jokes, swearing, insults, or erotic literature); the connection between SL manifestations and gender; and so on. The results reveal, among other things, the overwhelming presence of SL in their (our) daily lives; the undergraduates' willingness to discuss sex-related matters; the virtual non-existence of “impoliteness” among close friends; the existence of slightly different culture-specific attitudes towards SL; etc. There is also a prominent subtext: sex(uality) is a highly sensitive area in language use and might well serve as a reliable index of concern for the feelings of others and/or a reliable testing ground for how close we judge our friendship/relationship with others. Besides, sex-related language is, without a doubt, a highly “gendered” type of language which — via socialization and power conflicts — constructs people as complex “sexual” (and “gendered”) beings.

Although literacy programs in North African countries vary in method, management approach, and in content emphasis, their discourse is strikingly similar: It focuses too often on learners' deficits and considers the condition of these “illiterate” subjects, i.e. persons lacking the 3Rs, as a “disease” against which a war of eradication must be waged. For Government Agencies, NGOs, and other institutional actors in literacy projects, such lexicon of combat, in which the lack of print culture becomes a physiological scourge, becomes a convenient framework to develop measurable outcomes for the literacy efforts. However, as will be demonstrated in this paper, there is a serious risk that their reductive discourse will result in their losing a real opportunity to significantly enhance learning outcomes if the local knowledge of women, and particularly, senior women, are not integrated in the literacy efforts. Senior women are repositories of wisdom in their communities. From life experience, they have developed multiple literacy skills, unrelated to schooling, by which they contribute significantly in caring for the health of their kin and neighbors, in teaching survival and subsistence skills, and in transmitting their pragmatic wisdom to younger generations. Based on fieldwork conducted in rural Tunisia and Morocco, the authors provide examples to demonstrate that including senior women's knowledge in the literacy landscape would strengthen the literacy efforts upon which sustainable development depends.

Immigration is a phenomenon which has deeply upset the life of millions of Maghrebians, as a good many of their narratives show. The analysis of the immigrants' trajectories allows us to point out how language can become the means by which continuity, rupture, and building identities are expressed differently by men and women. This analysis also reveals that men's and women's complementary discourses are, at the same time, common and similar because they reflect their belonging to the same cultural background and the same social class. The principal corpus of the analysis is a documentary titled Mémoires d'immigrés. L'héritage maghrébin , produced by Yamina Benguigui in 1997, which is representative of one of these trajectories. Though audiovisual aids help to examine all the phenomena at the semiotic (gesture, posture, dress) and linguistic levels, in this article, we limit ourselves to a linguistic analysis of the complete narratives published by the producer in a book which came with the film. The analysis deals with both the immigrants' discourse and the discourse made about them by researchers and institutions. Its aim is to show the continuity, rupture, and building identities phenomena which characterize each group and to discuss, how, in front of the “same” event, specific strategies are adopted by men and women. In this way, we have related, on the one hand, gender, social class, and culture and, on the other hand, continuity, rupture, and building identities and the use of anaphora (we/them) and deictics (here/over there) where the referents are, by nature, dependent on the place where they speak. Résumé L'immigration est un phénomène qui a profondément bouleversé la vie de millions de Maghrébins comme en témoignent nombre de leurs récits. L'analyse de la relation, par les immigrés eux-mêmes, de quelques unes de ces trajectoires, permet de montrer comment la langue devient le moyen grâce auquel s'expriment continuité, rupture et construction identitaires de manière différente chez les hommes et les femmes, non pas tant en ce que leurs discours les opposent, mais parce qu'ils se construisent parallèlement et de manière complémentaire. Cette analyse permet également de montrer que ces discours parallèles sont en même temps communs et se rejoignent en ce qu'ils révèlent une appartenance à un même milieu culturel et une même classe sociale. Le support essentiel de l'analyse est un film documentaire, Mémoires d'immigrés. L'héritage maghrébin , réalisé par Yamina Benguigui en 1997 qui est représentatif de nombre de ces trajectoires. Bien que la nature du support permette que l'on puisse examiner, tout à la fois, les phénomènes d'un point de vue sémiologique (gestes, postures, vêture) et linguistique, nous nous sommes limitée, dans cet article, à une analyse linguistique des récits contenus dans le film ; récits complétés de ceux publiés par la réalisatrice dans un ouvrage (du même nom que le film) qui a accompagné la sortie du film. L'analyse porte sur le discours des immigrés sur eux-mêmes vs discours tenu, sur eux, par des chercheurs ou des institutionnels. Elle vise à mettre en évidence les phénomènes de continuité, de rupture et de construction identitaires propres à chaque groupe (homme / femme) et à voir comment, face à un “même” événement, se mettent en place des stratégies spécifiques pour les assumer. Pour ce faire, ont été mis en relation, d'une part, sexe, classe sociale et culture et, d'autre part, continuité, rupture et construction identitaires en examinant l'usage des anaphores ( nous/eux ) et des déictiques ( ici/là-bas ) dont les référents sont, par nature, tributaires du lieu d'où l'on parle.

To explore the issue of language in Djebar's work is no easy matter. In fact one may speak of languages rather than language and of voices rather than voice. And even when we speak of voices, Djebar's work is often about the non-voice and the multifarious silences of women. One important factor that groups these languages, voices and silences together is the omnipresent question of gender, which makes the main axle of Djebar's work from her first novel in 1957 to the present. Nevertheless, these two elements: language and gender are indissoluble when one speaks of Djebar, not only as a bilingual and Francophone writer but also as a bicultural woman straddling two worlds; that of the colonizer and that of the colonized both in colonial and post-colonial Algeria. She affirms, “For me, feminism has always been tied up with the question of language” (Djebar 1992: 176). This article endeavors to investigate the tantalizing fashion in which these two entities work in the Djebarian oeuvre.

This article is a comparative study of the gender approach of Sadiqi (2003) to Moroccan society and the sociolinguistic survey of De Ruiter (2006) carried out among 569 Moroccan students. Sadiqi labels the various languages used in Morocco, Standard and dialectal Arabic, French, and Amazigh (Berber) in terms of gender. Her observations are compared to the De Ruiter data on language proficiency, use, and attitudes of young Moroccan men and women with the aim to see to what extent the gender characterization of Sadiqi and the data of De Ruiter match. Full matches between both studies were not established, but the comparison shows that observational studies like the one by Sadiqi (2003), combined with empirical studies such as De Ruiter's (2006), yield a very rich basis for a fruitful evaluation and discussion of Morocco's languages in terms of gender.

This study is based on the theoretical premise that space shapes language use and that the interaction between language and space is subject to a social stratification built on gender. The Arabic variety of Ksar el Kebir, which is focused on here, presents a linguistic peculiarity, namely the absence of the opposition of vowel quantity. This characteristic, which developed during centuries because of historical, demographic, social specificities, and language contact, is not shared by the other Arabic varieties spoken in Morocco. However, strongly influenced by the prestigious Standard Arabic, the educated informants perceive an opposition of duration between vowels. This study explores, on the one hand, the gender differences in the perception of Moroccan lexemes, and on the other hand, the emergence of this distinction and its development during the primary and secondary school levels. The targeted population here is composed of 96 informants aged between 7 and 18, living in Ksar el Kebir, 48 girls and 48 boys, half of them living in the city center, and the other half in a new district in the suburbs. The informants had either primary or secondary education level, with 8 informants of the same age per level, 4 girls and 4 boys. Two lists of Moroccan Arabic lexemes of identical syllabic structure have been used as support for the test of perception [C1a1–C2a2], which after acoustic analysis, did not present any difference in vowel duration. Out of a total of 1920 lexemes and 3840 transcribed vowels, 1422 lexemes were perceived as including one or two long vowels [a:], i.e., 74%. The lexemes which were properly perceived represented 498, i.e., 25.9% of the total. The results reveal that, given the stimuli which contain no quantity opposition, the informants reconstruct mentally this contrast. Girls were more prompt to perceive the contrast of quantity as early as the first grades in primary school. The perception gap of more than 30% between the two sexes is maintained during almost the whole period of schooling.

A central issue in the interaction between language and gender in Morocco is urbanity. The written languages, namely Modern Standard Arabic and French, are the languages of institutions which have always been closely linked to urban areas, the typical loci of knowledge and power. Non-written languages, namely Berber and Moroccan colloquial Arabic, are represented as rural and indigenous because they are unlearned and are associated with rural areas, particularly Berber. Unlike the latter, Modern Standard Arabic and French are powerful because they are elitist, given their relation to education, government, and religion (Modern Standard Arabic). Berber and Moroccan Arabic are considered low or powerless because they lack the above-mentioned qualities and they are unimportant for social promotion. Language representations in Morocco are also important because they interact in significant ways with gender. Whereas Modern Standard Arabic and French are associated with public space, Berber and Moroccan Arabic are linked to private space, which happens to be the typical space of women; given the correlation between women, native tongues, and private space. However, with women's access to free education and to work in postcolonial Morocco, the notion of space changed, resulting in the recent mass feminization of the public sphere and women's access to “urban” languages, i.e., French and Modern Standard Arabic. As women have become more active in public life and the public sphere in general, they are considerably contributing to linguistic change and diversity and intensely instigating significant social changes.

The ideas and practices of gender are shaped and transmitted through language as the spoken word/s and the written word/s, and through gestures and the body. Language, in its various modes and registers, helps to disseminate ideas and practices of gender. Language is vehicle, knowledge, and power. It shapes images and representations of women through stereotypes, namely through proverbs, tales, adages, advertising, etc. Proverbs in particular have been tools of affirmation and resistance, of continuity and conversation, of rupture and innovation in the complex grid of gender and culture. Focus here is on the images of women in Moroccan Arabic and Berber proverbs and on orality (the heard and spoken language). The latter plumbs memories of feeling and events in which language itself is implicated, both in first producing and in later unlocking; proverbs are thus considered as cultural products and language use as an integral part of social ritual. Proverbs can operate negatively for women; however, as women move into literacy and other forms of “emancipation,” we must keep sight of the crucial functions of orality and the ways Moroccan culture perpetuates gender discrimination and relations through oral modes such as proverbs. The latter remind us of the roles women have played, and still play, as guardians of orality. Proverbs do not simply reflect the social reality of women, but help construct it.

This article explores ways that some Arabic and English bilingual Lebanese students use in constructing their gender identities in the two languages (Arabic and English). The research discussed addresses three questions: (1) To what extent does what the participants say reflect their ideology and gender identity? (2) Do they construct gender according to the cultural norms of the language they are speaking? and (3) Does speaking or learning a second language (SL) in the native country affect their gender performance in the native language (NL), i.e., does the ideology of the foreign culture affect the way they construct gender in the NL or vice versa? The findings show that males and females construct different feminine and masculine identities, in a range of ways, even when speaking the same language (English). I argue that this is because different interpretive repertoires imply different subject positions. Only one male conformed with the native language culture (NLC) stereotypes, one female conformed partially, while the two males and two females seemed to rebel against NLC. In the present study, the discourses produced in English and Arabic display differences in how the two languages construct gender. When people learn and use a foreign language in the mother country, they may either undergo different degrees of change in their understanding of gender, or may use the foreign language as a means of translating their NLC, i.e., find words to express gender ideologies of their NLC.

There are numerous books devoted to the question of language policy and literacy in Morocco, but they deal only with certain aspects of the field. To my knowledge, so far there seems to have been none that is devoted to multilingualism, culture, gender, identity, and education, and which are comprehensively presented in one book. Moha Ennaji's book is worth reading for anybody who is interested in linguistics, literacy, and language policy. It may be useful for linguists and non-linguists. It is also a valuable addition to sociolinguistic research. The range of topics explored makes it a worthwhile addition to any library of linguistics and non-linguistics. It gives a history of literacy and language education policy in Morocco, and sketches the complexity of the language situation before and after colonization. The book is divided into ten chapters. This division itself suggests the complexity of issues involved in this book.

Awareness of my unwitting role as a specialist in Fairclough's terms caused me to revisit my actions in the course of developing testing procedures and materials for Arapaho language classes in a local school district. I realize now that I could and would have supported the Arapaho teachers' positions more forcefully, had I been more aware at the time that their suggestions were attempts to maintain an Arapaho ideology and practice in the face of a hegemonizing process. The realization that my role served to diminish Arapaho control of the classroom led me to consider ways in which the specialist role can be used to maintain the non-dominant culture and ideology.