Perceiving East vs. West Beiruti Arabic: Gender and Language Attitudes in a Matched-Guise Experiment

Abstract

Lebanon’s linguistic landscape is shaped by complex historical, social, and political dynamics that intersect with class, sectarian affiliation, and gender ideologies. While sociolinguistic research has historically emphasized gender as a critical factor influencing language variation and attitudes, there is a notable scarcity of empirical work examining whether gender maintains its traditional influence on evaluative perceptions within contemporary, post-conflict, multilingual urban settings like the capital city, Beirut. This study directly addresses this gap by investigating a core sociolinguistic question: Does a rater’s gender influence attitudes toward the perceived East and West Beirut varieties of Lebanese Arabic? To provide an empirical answer, the research employed the rigorous matched-guise experiment methodology. The experimental stimuli involved eight speakers, carefully balanced across gender and the dialectal background (East vs. West Beirut). These speakers provided short audio recordings representing the target East and West Beirut speech varieties. The recordings were evaluated by a substantial sample of 200 participants, perfectly balanced by gender (100 men and 100 women) and evenly distributed across different age groups. Participants rated each recording on twelve evaluative traits using a four-point Likert-type scale. Quantitative data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA tests in SPSS to assess whether gender-based differences existed in evaluative judgments. The results reveal no statistically significant differences between male and female raters across all evaluative categories (p > .05). These findings indicate that, within this sample, gender does not significantly influence attitudes toward Beiruti dialects. Rather than suggesting complete attitudinal homogenization, the results point to a context-specific convergence in linguistic evaluations shaped by shared educational experiences, widespread multilingualism, and Beirut’s urban cosmopolitan environment. The study challenges established sociolinguistic assumptions that position gender as a stable predictor of language attitudes and highlights the importance of situating linguistic evaluations within evolving social and historical contexts. By highlighting how post-conflict urban environments can foster more overlapping linguistic perceptions, the study contributes to broader discussions on language, gender, and identity in multilingual societies. Future research would benefit from integrating qualitative methods to uncover the ideological frameworks underlying quantitative evaluations and to examine how gendered expectations emerge in spontaneous language use.