Comparing Malaysian apologies and responses to accusations with those of Japanese, British and Canadians: what is Malaysian pragmatic style?

Abstract

In order to evaluate differences in apologies across cultures, Tanaka, Spencer-Oatey, and Cray in their 2000 article ‘It’s not my fault!’: Japanese and English responses to unfounded accusations, compared responses for Japanese and English native speakers in problematic situations. They found that despite stereotypical expectations, the Japanese sample did not apologize any more frequently. The purpose of this paper is to expand the sample to include Malaysia which, because of its multicultural and multilingual make-up, provides a pronounced contrast to the countries previously surveyed. Our analysis found that despite some support for the supposed aversion to conflict and evidence of a greater propensity to apologize, there were also situations in which the Malaysian group was the most reluctant to apologize and was the most willing to assign blame. Malaysians also displayed other distinctive traits, such as the frequent use of respectful address titles and judicious switches in register according to the intended audience and the problem concerned. The conclusion considers differences in the results for the Malaysian and other samples, and proposes some representative characteristics of Malaysian pragmatic style which generally was found to be highly conscious of collectivism and authority.