Polite Request Among the Akyem Speech Community in Ghana

Esther Ofosua Totimeh

doi:10.11648/j.ijll.20150302.16

Esther Ofosua Totimeh

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20150302.16

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Abstract

This paper investigates into various ways by which native speakers of the Akyem Twi dialect of the Akan Language of Ghana make polite request and how social variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status influence their request making. An ethnographic research approach to qualitative design was employed and the research participants of twenty were randomly selected using the purposive sampling technique of which their responses from the interview and the observation to the topic problem were submitted to content analysis. The findings indicate that the strategy for polite request is the indirect strategy. Comparatively, the Akyem speech community equally prefers the conventional indirect strategy as the most polite strategy of request speech act as the other speech communities in Ghana. Also, social variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status influence request making yet equal status contradicts some findings in relation to familiarity. Again, Ghanaians have one condition that warrants request which is not part of the existing one; they believe that the individual granting the request should be trustworthy. Moreover, there were new interesting findings in this study.It was foundout that non-conventional indirect strategy has some natural features which make it different from the conventional strategy and more like the direct strategy, even though they are all indirect strategies.

Highlights

In the Akan society of Ghana, there are linguistic routines which are of greater value to them
Nodoushan (2008) found that social distance triggers indirectness in requestive speech acts (RSAs) and this study confirms that in the Akyem community social distance counts in request making since the society has created a distance between a child and an adult
I have demonstrated it to them so I expect them do same so if you are an older person I believe you should speak politely too.’ (Respondent 3) It seems that there has being responses from the young which might be that they do the opposite of what is expected of them in terms of request, so if the child goes against the norms of the society, reference is given to their parents that they did not raise them well

Summary

Introduction

In the Akan society of Ghana, there are linguistic routines which are of greater value to them. Linguistic routines are the sequential organizations beyond the sentence either as activities of one person or the interaction of two or more These routines include gestures, paralinguistic features, topics and rituals in everyday interaction but the most outstanding ones are greetings, apology, request, gratitude/thanking, and there counting of one’s mission because they are encountered daily. These are very important aspects of the Akan language that the society expects members to perform with the highest degree of communicative competence (Agyekum, 2010). Sociocultural variables like authority, age, and situational setting are supposed to influence the appropriateness and effectiveness of politeness strategies used to realize directive speech acts such as requests. As the influence of these variables may differ from one culture to another, these variations are relevant factors for a person's intercultural communication competence, viewed as his capacity to communicate appropriately and effectively in a foreign language (Garcia, 1996)

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