Abstract
In this research, we believe that there is political and social impact on the linguistic choices of males and females. The main objectives of the research are to investigate the way the political and social changes affect the linguistic word choices of Iraqis, and to find out the direction of the gender pattern. The main problem in Arabic sociolinguistics is the absence of a unitary gender pattern differentiation. However, in many cases, men, not women, have attempted to approximate the Standard Arabic. The issue of prestige is also confusing, because each Arab country has a local variety that is prestigious, but not necessarily the standard. This issue has motivated us to study the linguistic differences between males and females in their choices of 12 new lexical items in Baghdad, where all the events of the 2003 war happened. Twenty hours of tape recordings of ten males and ten females were investigated and analyzed. The most important finding in the current research is that female prestige is not associated with the standard variety. Rather, the meaning of words is what should be prestigious. For females, if the meaning of a word is stigmatized, then the word is stigmatized as well even if it is a standard word.
Highlights
When the concepts and values of people change, a need to satisfy that change by the innovation of new lexical items is recognizable
The analysis of data shows that the suggested words carry a sociolinguistic value as to the political and social orientation of the gender, and how each gender uses linguistic features to express personal values and beliefs, such as anger, protest, irony, satisfaction, and many other attitudes
Sixty-five percent of females think that these words are stigmatized forms of language that should not be uttered by women
Summary
When the concepts and values of people change, a need to satisfy that change by the innovation of new lexical items is recognizable. Mercer (2000, p. 13) pointed out that “every living language continues to evolve to meet the needs of its speakers.” She added, “ can existing words change their meaning and be combined in novel ways, new words and structures can be created as they are required.” Essentially, the innovation of new words can be seen, first, as a reaction to political, social, economic, scientific, and other factors; and second, as a reflection of language contact. 13) pointed out that “every living language continues to evolve to meet the needs of its speakers.” She added, “ can existing words change their meaning and be combined in novel ways, new words and structures can be created as they are required.”. The innovation of new words can be seen, first, as a reaction to political, social, economic, scientific, and other factors; and second, as a reflection of language contact In both cases, innovations occur to fulfill certain social needs and fill the gap in the actual language use of speakers in everyday conversation. Over the last 20 years, many events, inventions, values, principles, and concepts occurred and changed the way people look at things These phenomena changed and increased people’s vocabulary. The wars, civilian violence, discrimination, religious conflict, terrorism, human rights, gender issues, immigration, fashion, music, language contact, technology, and many other issues in the 21st century have been reflected in people’s speech. Crystal (2010) argued that English is “permanently evolving and developing new words and expressions are coined and existing words change their meaning as society, culture and technology progress.”
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