Gender-Linked Language Differences in Tahar Outtar’sRommana and DjamilaZenir’sBarbarian Tattoos

Abstract

Literature refers in general way to any group of written works that convey ideas across vast distances of time and space, and it is also used more narrowly for works that are art forms such as poetry, prose and drama. Differences occur between men and women, mainly in use of language in writing and in daily speech. The gender differences has become a very common issue and it has been of interest to researchers ; who conducted several studies to discover what these differences between the sexes aresince ancient times, and through which they come up with a set of theories. And each theory has its own characteristics, advantages and its difference view between men and women. Also, every writer or literary work has a theory that is applied on it. To analyze the literary works, and to be more certain, we relied in our study on the analysis of a sample of the literary works, which are two novels written in Arabic by famous Algerian writers, who lived in the same colonial period and dealt with various social, cultural and political issues. The first is Barbarian Tattoos by Jamila Zenir, which is a short novel, and the second novel is entitle Rommanaby Taher Ouatar, which is also a short novel. The aim of the linguistic analysis of these two novels is to discover the quality of language used in the dialogues between male and female characters. By employing two theories (deficit and dominance). In the end it turned out that the theory of dominance was applied to the both novels. As for the deficit theory, it was not fully realized because there are some statements that are true and some are not.