What are the Symbols of Qatari Culture?
As a Qatari female, I have been influenced tremendously by society. Especially that I have to watch every word or gesture I make, the way I walk or talk to other people. In other words, I do not have much freedom as Qatari society has females under the microscope.
Symbols are anything that carries a particular meaning, which is recognized by the people who share a culture. Symbols in Qatar vary, there are certain words and things we are not allowed to say as these are recognized as wrong or “haram” which means it is against our religion. For example, asking a man what his mother’s name is; is considered wrong and intolerable unless you are part of the family whilst in other country there is no problem in sharing such information with a friend.
However, Qatari and Arab teens have now created a new sub-culture by the symbols we use to “Blackberry message (bbm)” or “text” each other with. As Western movies, songs, shows have entered our lives we have started communicating in English with one another. Arabic has not been forgotten but we prefer typing in English that is why we created a language called “arabeezii” which means Arabic/English in one word. Where we write an Arabic word in English and use numbers to make the certain letters in Arabic differ from one another. This is a new generation technique which was created with the rise of technology, but if you ask most teens and look at their phones, most probably you would not understand the language unless you knew what each number represented as a letter in Arabic.
