Gender of Unmarked Feminine Nouns in Beni Hammou

All languages refer to gender as feminine and masculine. Arabic as one of these languages distinguishes between feminine and masculine genders. In Arabic1 feminine words have the ending ‘-a’ to be different from masculine words which carry no suffix and thus are unmarked for gender: ?ha?r-a? ‘stone’, and ?ward-a? ‘rose’ are examples of feminine nouns having ‘-a’ at the end, while ???b?e? ‘plate’ and ?kursi? ‘chair’ are masculine nouns without being marked. However, there are cases where the feminine nouns are unmarked and the decision about whether a noun is feminine or masculine is hard. This paper is intended to examine variation in the unmarked feminine nouns in Beni Hammou Arabic (BHA), a spoken variety in Beni Hammou, a village among the thirteen villages2 that form the valley of Beni Snous which is an area situated on the Algero- Moroccan confines, 600 km North West of Algeria and 35km far from Tlemcen. Classical Arabic (CA) is considered here as a reference point by which the variation in question in this paper is to be compared.