Gender Variation Elicited in the Intonational Patterns of Compliments in Everyday Spoken Iraqi Arabic: An Auditory Study

The current study explores the effect of gender on the music of language i.e. intonation in relation to the pronunciation of compliments. It examines if there is any relation between the gender of the speaker and the use of certain intonational patterns in the pronunciation of compliments. The participants are 48 men and women who are native speakers of Iraqi Arabic 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. The analysis of the results reveals that there are differences between the men and women of the three educational groups in their pronunciation of compliments. Women, more than men, tend to use rising tones on this type of polite utterances; 67% of compliments produced on rising tones were pronounced by women whereas only 33% of them were pronounced by men.