Cross cultural pragmatics: Apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic

Abstract

In the last two decades, many studies have been conducted to investigate speech act performance in general, and apology speech act in particular. This genus of research has focused on western languages. However, more recently a number of studies have been carried out in eastern languages, with only a few in Arabic language varieties. The underlying motivation of speech act studies is to outline the pragmatic rules that govern the use of language in different cultures and to show how findings can be used to facilitate communication between people from different socio-cultural backgrounds. This study is an attempt to outline the type and extent of use of apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic and hence shed light on the socio-cultural attitudes and values of this community. The corpus examined was 1082 responses to a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that consisted of 10 different social situations of varying severity of offense, strength of social relationship and power between hypothetical speakers and hearers. The informants were 110 college educated adults in Khartoum, Sudan. The survey was written in Sudanese dialect to elicit responses that approximate verbal apologies that might be given in these situations. The corpus was analyzed to determine the strategies used and the frequencies of their use. Although this is a pioneering study in its societal context, results support earlier findings suggesting the universality of apology strategies; however, the selection of apology strategies in this study reinforces the culture-specific aspect of language use. Despite the fact that a more restricted classification of apology strategies was used as a model for analyzing the data, the results are expected to be conducive to cross-cultural comparisons.