Swahili. Perceptions of gender in Swahili language and society

Beck, Rose Marie

doi:10.1075/impact.11.17bec

In:Gender Across Languages: The linguistic representation of women and men
Edited by Marlis Hellinger and Hadumod Bußmann
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 11] 2003
► pp. 311–337

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Swahili. Perceptions of gender in Swahili language and society

Rose Marie Beck | University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Published online: 10 April 2003

https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.11.17bec

1.Introduction

2.Noun classes in Swahili

2.1Swahili noun classification and agreement

2.2Animate nouns

2.3Coordination

2.4Personal nouns

3.Referring to women and men

3.1Lexical and covert gender

3.2Kinship terms and terms of address

3.3Overt gender marking: Attributing ‘female/male’

3.4Obscene language

4.Gendered speech

4.1Upole ‘gentleness’: Restrained speech as a cultural ideal on the Swahili coast

4.2Texts on textiles: Equivocal messages

5.Conclusion

Notes

References

Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

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Krause-Alzaidi, Lara-Stephanie

2023. Relanguaging translingual writing in a Khayelitshan primary school. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 20:3 ► pp. 237 ff.

Romańczuk, Izabela

2023. Feminist discourses on utu and heshima in selected works by Tanzanian women writers. In Language, Culture, Literature Intertwined. The Swahili Perspective,

Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona

2018. Address inversion in Swahili: Usage patterns, cognitive motivation and cultural factors . Cognitive Linguistics 29:3 ► pp. 545 ff.

Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona

2024. Is Time Money, Is Argument War? Swahili Cultural Conceptualizations and Language Usage. In The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics [Springer Handbooks in Languages and Linguistics, ], ► pp. 655 ff.

Thompson, Katrina Daly

2011. Zanzibari women’s discursive and sexual agency: Violating gendered speech prohibitions through talk about supernatural sex. Discourse & Society 22:1 ► pp. 3 ff.

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