Abstract:
In this study, I provide a linguistic description of the gender differences in the dialect of the non-refugee citizens of Gaza City. I tease out the gender-based differences in the Gaza City citizens’ dialect at the phonological, lexical, morphological and discourse levels and explore the linguistic structure of this variety of Arabic. The Palestinian Arabic variety is the regional dialect of the Arabic language spoken by
Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Arabs of Israel and those in diaspora - Palestinians abroad in Lebanon, Jordan and other countries. There are many sub-dialects of the Palestinian Arabic variety; almost every city, town and village has its own variety.
All sub-dialects are mutually intelligible, however, these sub-dialects exhibit a number of
linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar. The Gaza City citizens’ dialect refers
to the speech of the non-refugee citizens settled in Gaza City, who are not refugees from other parts of Palestine. The data collected is a spontaneous speech sample from four citizens of Gaza City, two males and two females. Data is recorded in casual conversations. Speakers
belong to the same age group, all between 20 and 25 years. Participants share the same
socioeconomic status as they all belong to the upper middle class. They also have the
same educational background, as they are all university students. All the speakers were
born to non-refugee citizen parents and raised in Gaza City. The conversations are forty
five to sixty minutes long. Four speech samples are recorded using the two males and two
females to come up with four conversations --male1-female1, male1-male2, female1-female2 and male2-female2. Ten minutes of each speech sample is examined for gender differences (phonological, lexical and morphological). The main gender differences that emerged from the data include phonological differences in the use of the variable /q/ in which female participants used the variant [ʔ] while the male participants used the variant [g] consistently except for one male participant. In addition, the two genders used a
variety of discourse markers with different frequencies and functions.
