Gender-inclusive language in Arabic: avenues, strategies and challenges
Farida Soliman (Queen Mary University of London)
Arabic possesses a two-gender grammatical system with feminine and masculine distinctions. Historically, this grammatical gender system has created a reliance on masculine grammatical gender, which as seen in other languages, perpetuates an over-representation of men in perception (Koeser and Sczesny, 2014; Redl et al., 2021; Brauer and Landry, 2008; Sato et al., 2013; Gygax et al., 2008). This was yet to be explored or tested in Arabic, until now. Arabic’s journey with inclusive language is relatively novel and riddled with multiple barriers.
From a linguistic perspective, Arabic’s highly inflectional nature presents a challenging endeavour in the avoidance of binary grammatical gender. While other languages have found success in introducing exogenous morphology (e.g., amigxs), similar strategies remain incompatible with Arabic due to its extensive gender agreement.
From a sociocultural perspective, there is still a lack of acceptance, understanding, or acknowledgement of the movement towards inclusive language. People’s reluctance to adopt gender-inclusive language is multifaceted. Many Arabic-speakers consider inclusive strategies to be inefficient as the masculine is perceived as sufficiently representative of women and men. Secondly, gender inclusion is not a priority in Egypt, especially in the workplace where the aversion to working women is high. Additionally, nonbinary gender identities are unrecognised and marginalised. Therefore, the typical goal often found in the Global North of increasing ‘visibility’ and ‘representation’ may run counter-intuitive to the needs of nonbinary Arabs.
Based on these barriers, I aim to identify and assess the existing and emergent strategies used by Arabic speakers to achieve gender inclusivity. Therefore, the following questions are explored through a series of experimental and ethnographic approaches: what is the impact of using masculine grammatical gender marking on perception (Soliman et al., 2023), representation (Soliman, 2023) and attitudes (Soliman & Sczesny, 2023)? What does inclusive language look like in Arabic? What are people’s attitudes towards inclusive language and how can we promote the use of inclusive language in these contexts?
Specifically, the first experiment investigates how grammatical gender marking affects male-bias in perception in a game-setting. While the second, more applied, experiment explores how gender & language in Egyptian recruitment affect applicants’ perceived employability? Further, using an ethnographic approach I explore how Arabic speakers navigate social context, audience, and space in relation to choice of inclusive language. Through this, I strive towards a deeper understanding of how different Arabic-speakers create gender-inclusive environments. Finally, using novel methods, I propose a creative and efficient way to use both feminine and masculine morphology that would have similar indexical meaning to the spanish “x”.
References
Brauer, M., & Landry, M. (2008). Un ministre peut-il tomber enceinte? L’impact du générique masculin sur les représentations mentales. [Can a Secretary of State become pregnant? The influence of the masculine generic on mental representations.]. L’Année Psychologique, 108(2), 243-272. https://doi.org/10.4074/S0003503308002030
Gygax, P., Gabriel, U., Sarrasin, O., Oakhill, J., & Garnham, A. (2008). Generically intended, but specifically interpreted: When beauticians, musicians, and mechanics are all men. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(3), 464-485. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960701702035
Koeser, S., & Sczesny, S. (2014). Promoting Gender-Fair Language: The Impact of Arguments on Language Use, Attitudes, and Cognitions. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33(5), 548. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0261927X14541280
Redl, T., Frank, S. L., de Swart, P., & de Hoop, H. (2021). The male bias of a generically-intended masculine pronoun: Evidence from eye-tracking and sentence evaluation. PLOS ONE, 16(4). https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249309
Sato, S., Gygax, P. M., & Gabriel, U. (2013). Gender inferences: Grammatical features and their impact on the representation of gender in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16(4), 792-807. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728912000739
Soliman, F. (2023). Gender bias in the language used in Egyptian online job recruitment. Submitted to Gender, Work, and Organization. Preprint available here.
Soliman, F., & Sczesny, S. (2023). How does gender and language in Egyptian online recruitment affect applicants’ perceived hireability and suitability?. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/N8TYD
Soliman, F., Stockall, L., & Sharma, D. (2023). Registered report protocol: Perceptual effects of Arabic grammatical gender on occupational expectations in a gamified speech production task. PLOS ONE, 18(10), e0292936. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292936