Power and Gender in Saudi Hijazi Proverbs: An Ideological-Cultural Study

Proverbs generally reflect a nation's social values, norms and attitudes. Several studies have looked into the representation of women in proverbs. However, such research on women's portrayal in Arabic proverbs is scarce. The aim of this research is to explore the representations of women in Hijazi proverbs in Saudi Arabia. Twenty-five proverbs portraying women were selected from several authentic books of Hijazi using the Feminist critical discourse analysis approach. On one hand, the findings showed women were represented negatively as lacking intellectual maturity, failures, incapable of carrying out their tasks, bad-decision makers, inclined to bias, and the source of temptation for men. On the other hand, women were praised in a number of proverbs that confine them to particular restricted gender roles, such as mothers, wives and daughters. We argue that some of the Hijazi proverbs on women may represent negative images of women and that should not be encouraged, or perhaps that would be advisable not to encourage their use in Hijazi society or to refrain from using them when communicating with women.

Politicizing COVID-19 Lingua in Western and Arab Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis

COVID-19 has struck the world in an unprecedented way. Countries quickly tried to counter the rapid spread of the virus by imposing strict measures and national lockdowns. At the same time, some governments took advantage of the pandemic to besmirch their opponents. We utilize van Dijk (J Polit Ideol 11(2):115-140 2006) critical discourse analysis model to investigate how newspaper headlines reacted to COVID-19 from through ideological lenses. Results show that while the US implied that China is the origin of the virus, headlines in Arab newspapers showed that Saudi Arabia blamed travel to Iran for the early increases of COVID-19 cases.

Saudi English: A Descriptive Analysis of English Language Variations in Saudi Arabia

The paper describes Saudi English morphosyntactic and lexical features that are widely practiced among educated Saudis, who completed at least nine years of English language study. The occurrence of the morphosyntactic features is argued to be affected by the speakers' contact to the native English. Those who are in direct contact with Standard English (Std Eng) have 15 morphosyntactic features unlike those who have no direct contact to Std Eng (or EFL speakers) and who produce 15 more traits. Accordingly, the paper distinguishes between stable traits used by all the speakers and the ones that are used by EFL speakers only. The abundant features of Saudi English are further analyzed in comparison to those of other World Englishes varieties as well as in comparison to the Arabic structures. As for the lexical level, local lexemes are described. They are grouped into words that are borrowed from Arabic and words that are translated from Arabic. Overall, this study contributes to the exploration of the Expanding Circle variety of Saudi English and to the effect of language contact on language variations.