Gender variation elicited in the intonational patterns of address terms in everyday spoken Iraqi Arabic : an acoustic study

Abstract EN

The current study explores the effect of gender on the music of language, i.e.

intonation in relation to the pronunciation of address terms.

It examines if there is any relation between the gender and educational background of the speaker and the use of certain intonational patterns.

The participants are 48 men and women who are native speakers of Iraqi Arabic dialect spoken in the city center of Basrah.

They are divided into three groups: educated, partly educated and uneducated participants.

Halliday’s system of intonation (2008) is adopted to describe the intonational patterns pronounced by the participants.

Data are analyzed using the Praat software and forwarded to statistical analysis in order to verify possible significant differences in the performance of men and women in the use of falling and rising tones and in the prosodic parameters evaluated (pitch range, intensity and duration).

The analysis of the results reveals that women tend more than men to use rising tones on address terms.

In addition, the pitch range of women is higher than that of men in relation to bisyllabic tonic segments.