Women in Yemen speak differently from men, or have done until very recently. They also use language differently, seizing opportunities of self-expression as a strategy for coping with restrictions in their lives.

Yemen is extremely diverse in dialects, with variants of Arabic (and older South Arabian languages) differing from region to region and even from village to village. Women tend to speak the most traditional forms of old dialects. Sometimes they use variants which men say they themselves would be ashamed to utter, as s…