“Just a little overweight”

Abstract This study investigates the impacts of age and gender on the use of euphemistic strategies in Alexandrian Arabic, a dialect that is spoken in the coastal city of Alexandria to the north-west of Egypt. To achieve this objective, a role-play that includes 6 situations categorised to account for the age and gender variables groups was developed and administered to 160 Alexandrian Arabic speakers, who were divided into four primary groups, each consisting of 40 speakers based on age (old vs young) and gender (male vs female). The responses were analysed using a mixed-methods approach, with quantitative and qualitative measures. The analysis is based on a taxonomy we collected from many previous frameworks, such as Allan and Burridge (1991) and Warren (1992). The results revealed age to be a crucial factor in selecting euphemistic strategies: the older group most frequently employed the implication strategy, and the synonym strategy was more common among the younger group. The results further revealed that gender has a lesser effect on the choice of euphemistic strategies by the participants: borrowing is more common among the female participants, and other methods are utilised almost equally by the two genders. This denotes that although specific euphemism strategies, like synonymy and deletion, can be age-specific, others, such as understatement and taboo, cut across age groups, which can perhaps be seen as manifestations of norms culturally embedded. Gender differences are also only slightly significant except in borrowing, in which females use this strategy more than males, perhaps due to their sociocultural or sociolinguistic functions that shaped women’s language.