A study of metaphors and proverbs among the Qatari, Palestinian and Tunisian dialects
What is it about?
Metaphors and proverbs are an indispensable sociocultural aspect of language. In this paper, we look at the sociocultural linguistic heterogeneity codified through metaphors and proverbs among three Arabic dialects, namely the Qatari, the Palestinian, and the Tunisian ones. The corpora of metaphors and proverbs have been elicited through interviews with relatives and friends, who live in Qatar, Palestine, and Tunisia respectively. The data are analyzed in the context of cognitive metaphor theory with a focus on comparative and interactionist perspectives. The physical appearance and sexual orientation-related differences we have found in metaphors and proverbs offer a glimpse of the various social orders, symbolic meanings, and lifestyles found in the three respective Arab cultures. The study is, thus, a suggestion on how to analyze qualitatively sociocultural linguistic heterogeneity at the level of figurative language and its symbolic meanings.