The Language of Jordanian Men in the City of Amman

Abstract

The relatively recent upsurge of interest in the language of men at the international level men
level owes a significant deal to sociolinguistics, conscious masculine and interesting awareness
of civil rights. This interest is also great enhanced by the quick social change in the dress,
appearance, and behavior of men in Jordan. However, as in all domains of scientific research,
mainstream men’s sociolinguistics is a field of controversy. Writing from various perspectives,
authors address the subject of men language with different aims in mind. For instance, some of
these authors (cf. Labove 1972; Ervin-Tripp 1978; Hymes 1974) have pointed the
interdependence of patterns of speech variation and the gender of the speaker/ hearer. Moreover,
other authors (Lakoff 1975; Zimmermann and West 1975) have assured that gender differences
are basically attributed to the socialization factor, hence the relevance of other variables such as
ethnic membership, age, and social class in the analysis of ladies language. On the other hand,
other authors (Coates 1986; Bull and Swan 1992) think gender differences as reflexes of some
types of men’s sociolinguistic “subculture.”
In Jordan, no attention is being paid to the language of men in the burgeoning domains of
Jordanian sociolinguistics beyond indications hare and there that the variable of gender is
important in performance. This may be due to the fact that men in this country are still, to a large
extent, culturally invisible. The matter fact, documentation on the language of men in the Arab
world at large is likely to be very seldom.
Jordan is a multilingual country where Jordanian Arabic, Caucasian, English and classical or
standard Arabic are used with varying degrees of frequency in Jordan (cf. Enajji1991). In this
paper I will concentrate on two major themes: (1) the situations in which ladies use a particular
language, as well as the constraints on this use, and (2) the social aspects of the image of men in
Jordanian Arabic, the lingua franca for all men in Jordan except cases of Caucasian living in
different areas in Jordan.
The paper is structured as follows: in the first section, some preliminaries concerning the gender
variable are given. In the second, the methodology used in data collection is briefly described.
Third one is an interpretation of the results of data analysis is presented. The last one is the
language of and about men is correlated with their overall socio-economic status.