asmariya

This topic of gender in linguistics is so fascinating to me. There is something funnily related to this in Tunisia Tunisia is a linguistic exception in the Maghreb insofar as it's the only country where the sedentary, urban variety of Arabic prevailed over the rural Bedouin (Hilali) varieties and is gradually displacing them. Put simply, sedentary Tunisian Arabic (which pronounces the qaf as [q] for example, and uses ena (I,me) instead of na) is spreading at the expense of Bedouin varieties (which pronounce the qaf as [g]) Elsewhere in the Maghreb, the opposite happened. In Libya, for example, Tripoli once had its own older urban dialect but now speaks a Bedouinized variety. Morocco falls somewhere in between and its national koiné centered on Casablanca and Rabat is built largely on rural Bedouin-type speech (3roubi) brought to the cities by massive rural migration in the cities What is driving the spread of urban Tunisian into the countryside is largely rural women Rural communities are adopting a dialect that was not originally their own and this adoption is strongly skewed by gender. Because the sedentary variety is perceived as softer and more feminine (Tunisians have a word for this: "finu", which means refined, genteel), rural women are adopting it much faster than rural men There was a study of this phenomenon in rural Tunisia; and it concluded that women are the driving force behind the linguistic change, like in many other cases