Abstract
Effective communication between people from different cultures requires not only the ability to speak a common language but also an awareness of sociocultural rules and sociolinguistics features, an important one being speech acts the realization of which realization by Emirati non-native speakers of English has not been studied sufficiently. This paper investigates a particularly face-threatening speech act - refusals. It explores Emiratis comfort level and the use of the refusal speech act in communicative exchanges with unknown tourists. The data set consisted of 94 participant responses to a pre-instructional activity in an introductory linguistics class. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data sets. The key findings suggest that both male and female participants were rather comfortable conversing with a tourist couple that they had never met, but male participants reported being more at ease accepting the couples request to take a photo with the tourists at a statistically significant level. While more than half of the participants reported willingness to take the photo with the tourists, approximately 41.5% would decline such a request, with significantly more females declining the request. The most frequent components of the refusal speech act included a statement of regret, a thank-you note, and an excuse, reason, or explanation. Results also showed that linguistic devices for positive politeness purposes were used rather sparingly, and it was mainly the females who used them. Based on the results, it is helpful for visitors to the UAE to be mindful of Emiratis' sociocultural and sociolinguistic behaviors so that the nuances of communication can be understood and responses are appropriate, which can reduce the likelihood of communication breakdowns and increase the well-being of all involved in the interaction.
Highlights
Awareness of socio-cultural rules is a sine qua non for effective communication with people from other cultures
The main aim of this study was to describe the refusal speech act set produced by Emiratis interacting with tourists
It is possible that the participants in the current study did not consider obligatory activities such as consultations with expatriate faculty when answering the question As well, the observation that “[a] large section of expatriates living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are unaware of their host country's traditions and many have only learned about things that affect their lives” (Sherif & de Leon 2012: parag. 10) may have led the participants of this study to keep their interaction with expatriates, and with tourists, to a minimum
Summary
Awareness of socio-cultural rules is a sine qua non for effective communication with people from other cultures Does this awareness include social norms, but it includes ways in which language should be used to achieve communication aims. Differences between cultural norms as well as between meanings of words may still cause challenges This is the case when communicators resort to direct translations from their first language (L1) into the foreign language (L2). Our language competence largely depends on our “knowledge and ability in ways that are both grammatical and socially appropriate” (Bauman & Sherzer 1975: 108) This necessitates the awareness of a variety of sociolinguistic features of the L2 in which one wishes to communicate, such as speech acts. Does effective intercultural communication require understanding of the sentence in its semantic meaning, but it necessitates “pragmatic competence to understand and perform different speech acts in intercultural contexts” (Iliadi & Larina 2017: 532)
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