Different Gender, Different Arabic? The Case of Israel

The present article indicates that women and men write different Arabic in the Israeli press. These differences are observable in the frequency of main and secondary clauses (i.e. in sentence length and in variation), in word order, in the frequency of clauses containing adjectives, as well as those containing adverbs. We see these differences in the frequency of verbs without any visible noun, as well as in the choice of conjunction and the choice of particle of negating the past. These variations in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are due to the gender of the reader, as is the case with adjectives, where women writers use markedly fewer adjectives than men do, except when writing for men. But the variation is otherwise dependent on the gender of the writer. This alternation is not between grammatical or ungrammatical Arabic. Indeed, both genders write correct Arabic. Instead it is (mostly) a question of choice, of style.