A Socio-linguistic Survey on Females’ Politeness Strategies in the Same Gender and in the Cross-Gender Relationship

Abstract

Politeness is a phenomenon which is common to all cultures. Each culture has a different perception of what is polite and each language has various devices for expressing politeness. One of the important aspects of politeness which is the central focus of many studies is the polite behaviors of men and women. The focus of this study is on the politeness strategies of males and females from different aspects. The central aim of this paper is to examine the impact of gender on the politeness strategies of the speakers to see whether females speak more politely to females than to males or not. Therefore, a questionnaire was designed based on Discourse Completion Test which is originally developed for comparing different speech act realization patterns. The questionnaire was distributed to 30 females and 30 males. The result indicated that generally women speak more politely to women than to men; however, males speak more politely to females than to males. Therefore, it can be concluded that the gender of the listener is an important factor on politeness behaviors of the speakers.