SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the correlation between the social differentiation caused by sexual discriminations, and the linguistic differences between means and women's speech in Tlemcenian Arabic and Tlemcenian French, with special emphasis on the former. It includes a chapter concerned with a brief treatment of the place of sex-dialect in modern linguistic theory, an analysis of the possible realisations and explanations of sex-dialect, and a review of some broad concepts such as bilingualism, diglossia and code-switching, in the light of male-female linguistic differentiation. The three remaining chapters furnish proof and exemplification of the linguistic manifestation of the social division caused by sexual divisions. Within these chapters, the concept of context of situation is emphasised as being a very important parameter in language study. The second chapter is concerned with phonological differences between males and females, and starts with the correlation between formant frequency and social conditioning, and proceeds to consider the use of vowels and consonants as well as certain prosodic features in the speech of males and females. Certain sociolinguistic parameters such as age, status, and so forth, are shown here and elsewhere to have important impact on language use. The third chapter is a study of the grammatical manifestations of sex-dialect, the majority of which are mostly accounted for in terms of probability of occurrence. Finally, the last chapter is concerned with lexical differences in male and female speech in both address and reference. At every point during this discussion, there is a strong reminder of the interrelationship between social behaviour, culture, and language use.