Women’s language then and now. Differences and similarities in the speech of three Damascene women belonging to three generations of the same family

Abstract

This paper presents a brief study of the speech of three Damascene women from three generations of the same family: an elderly woman, her daughter, and her granddaughter. The study is based on recordings collected in the Syrian capital between 2007 and 2008. The primary aim is to investigate how the variables of age and education impact linguistic variation. To achieve this goal, the paper adopts a female-oriented qualitative approach, comparing the speech of the three informants. In addition, the study considers the gender variable, contrasting our results with studies on language and gender focused on other societies. Our findings confirm the existence of features in the speech of the three informants that are documented in women belonging to other societies and are attributed to the gender variable. The most significant differences among the three participants are observed in response to the variable of age, while the variable of education plays a secondary role.