Sorry in the Pacific: Defining communities, defining practices

Abstract

This article examines the distribution of speech acts based on the word sore ‘sorry’ in Bislama, the creole language spoken in Vanuatu. Three functions of these “apology” routines are identified and analyzed within the framework of politeness theory. Women are shown to use sore more frequently over all than men; they are also found to use sore to express empathy with the referent/addressee. Empathy is expressed in men's speech in other ways. The asymmetric distribution of sore is shown to make sense, given wider societal beliefs about and attitudes toward appropriate behaviors for women and men. Given a strict definition of a “community of practice,” it is clear that this shared speech behavior does not mean that women in this speech community can be said to form a community of practice. Analyses based on the speech community and intergroup distinctiveness are more useful in understanding this variation. This article has benefited from discussions with other members of the Language and Gender panel at the 6th ICLASP meeting, University of Ottawa, May 1997, especially Janet Holmes. Some of the data were also presented at the Second British Roundtable on Social Theory in Sociolinguistics, University of Wales, Cardiff, July 1997; discussions there with Ben Rampton and John Heritage were very helpful. My early thoughts were shaped in conversations with Herbert Morris and Gillian Sankoff. None of the aforementioned necessarily agree with the analysis presented here. Many thanks to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their generous support in the field (#5742).