Iraqui-Sinaceur’s paper links Moroccan women to culture and underlines the fact that women’s emancipation in Morocco should not obscure the crucial role of oral literature and the role of women as the “guardians” of this literarture. The author concentrates on a specific genre of oral literarture: proverbs and depicts the various ways in which Moroccan culture perpetuates gender views through proverbs. Although negative to women in general, proverbs need to be treasured and transmitted by women as they are vehicled in the two mother tongues that are typically oral languages: Moroccan Arabic and Berber.

    Eid’s paper analyses the relationship between language and gender through the analysis of proverbs in the Egyptian society. She investigates the complex relationship between language, culture, and society through an analysis of proverbs which the author takes to be similar to obituaries in the sense that both types of text reflect and construct reality. The fact that proverbs, like obituaries, do not simply reflect reality is attested in the discrepancies between the worlds that proverbs create within a certain cutlure and the expectations of people in this cutlure.

    The paper sets out to examine how and why Eastern Moroccan men and women mark politeness differently. To get some tentative answers, the compliment speech act is chosen for study. I try to see how and why both sex-groups pay compliments. I further investigate their strategies in responding to compliments and the possible topics they compliment each other about. Upon close analysis, women are found to be more likely than men to avoid threatening the face needs of their addressees for want of keeping good social relationship/solidarity with them. Conversely, men’s linguistic behaviours quite often displayed less concern for their audience. This pattern implies that women might use a high frequency of linguistic positive politeness (i.e., matching the positive expectations with those of recipients), whereas men tend to approximate to the negative politeness of linguistic patterns (i.e., matching the negative expectations with those of recipients).

    This paper is based on ongoing field research and looks at the orature produced by the women of Dousderm, a village in the Anti Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco. It argues that because of the complex sociopoliticolinguistic situation in Morocco today, recording and study of this orature is important not only for Morocco and general literary enrichment but also in terms of legitimization of the voices of women within a traditionally patriarchal, Islamic society. The discourse of these Berber women, indeed, occupies a separate space.

    Three arguments underpin this paper. One, the new construct and analytical tool called “gender” has universal meanings and applications; it is generic and as such cannot be the exclusive property of, or relevant only to, any particular group or culture. Two, historically, a notion of “gender” (and the idea of cultural construction more broadly) already existed in the arabophone world centuries before the concept “gender” was distilled and named in the 20th century. What we now call “gendering” or “gender analysis” has long been practiced in the arabophone world, and especially within Islamic discourse. Three, and related to the second argument, is that the named and defined concept “gender” in the process of traveling becomes naturalized as it enters into and engages with a particular (cultural, local) universe or epistemological system. Yet, “gender”, like many new constructs and terms, in the process of their early circulations, may also be denigrated or trivialized. This happened in the arabophone world when “gender” was still new, during its tortuous movements within the academy and while voyaging out into society at large.

    Introductions are a relatively new phenomenon in Moroccan culture. As a concept correlating in complex but interesting ways with language and gender, introductions in the Moroccan context carry all the antagonisms, dilemmas, and hybridization that the clash between Moroccan and Western cultures brought about starting from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. On the basis of data gathered in natural situations, this article attempts to localise the various aspects of Moroccan culture that interact with introductions in a particular community: Fès, Morocco. Fès is an ideal context of analysis for the purposes of this article as it displays both traditional and modern facets of Moroccan culture and, hence, exemplifies the antagonisms between the two in a “deep” way. Such a context is also ideal for exploring the gender-identity in the Fès community in the light of the most recent theories of language and gender.

    Aburisha’s paper deals with sexism in Standard (written) Arabic. On the basis of the recent theories on language and gender, she gives convincing examples that Arabic is a typically sexist language. The authgor explains sexism in Arabic by reference to the patriarchal and heavily gendered Arab socities and calls for freeing Arabic dictionaries and the Arabic language from blatant sexism.