Mengting Hu
I am Chinese, and I speak English quite fluently as a second language. I have been studying and working in English-speaking environments for several years. However, after all those experiences, when I want to be polite, or sometimes, to be impolite, it is still relatively difficult! Anglophone friends sometimes tell me I am not polite when I think I am very polite. Occasionally, I get disappointed in myself for being too polite when I should not.
Connecting with my earlier English learning experience and comparing these two different cultures, i.e. Chinese and English cultures, I realize there are two main reasons. First, decontextualized learning of English language in China leads to oversimplified language output. In English classes, we learn the most polite language forms, e.g. “Could you give/ would you mind giving me a cup of tea”, with a lot of grammar drills and practices. The result of this is, even now, I still mechanically produce those forms without thinking about the context. For example, instead of asking an inattentive student directly, “look at the board”, I would say, “Could you look at the board?” That very polite tone doesn’t help effectively in this context.
Secondly, cultures shape politeness differently. Van Herk (2012) writes, “Cross-cultural misunderstandings result from different ideas of what counts as polite and appropriate” (p.120). In his accounts, people from Asian countries are likely to develop “negative politeness strategies” that are ways to preserve status or to show respect by minimizing interactions or apologizing for bothering someone. However, American speakers use “positive politeness strategies” that contains more compliments and in-group language or nicknames. This observation of “negative politeness strategies” applies well to my own language use. Right before I wrote this blog, I asked my supervisor for a reference and I wrote a small note at the end, “I know you are very busy at XXX. I hope this won’t add too much pressure on you!” Thus, the effects of culture on people’s perception and understanding of politeness are evidently very strong.
To conclude, it is very important to be aware of the cross-cultural difference of politeness in everyday life, especially for second language speakers. More importantly, we should learn different language forms, communication strategies and methods to be able to be polite or to be impolite.
Questions to consider:
- In your culture, do people use more “negative politeness strategies” or “positive politeness strategies”? Any example?
- Have you experienced inappropriate politeness or impoliteness, whether from yourself or from others? What were your reactions? What were the (cultural, linguistic, and etc.) reasons behind this appropriateness?
Reference:
Van Herk, G. (2012). What is Sociolinguistics? Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Thanks Mengting for making the difference between positive and negative politeness strategies so clear. I have to admit that as a second-language user of Chinese, in the days when I could actually limp along in a conversation, I got into trouble OFTEN. The rules are so different! I hope I have mentioned the field of “cross-cultural pragmatics” in class. Pragmatics and sociolinguistics overlap a lot; here’s what New Zealand linguist Janet Holmes says about the overlap: “Sociolinguists describe the linguistic resources available in speech communities, and provide a systematic account of how social variables influence linguistic choices from among those resources. Pragmatics explains how individuals use linguistic resources to produce and interpret meaning in interaction, and sometimes to change relationships. Certain aspects of each discipline are generally recognized as distinct, but there are also areas of overlap” (https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.294.02hol )
Anyway, the study of different linguistic ways to express politeness sometimes seems to me to take up about 90% of the space in cross-cultural pragmatics research! But I’m making the figure up. We’d have to do an empirical study to really know…
Ken’s response;
Thank you for sharing your experience, and yes, my language has negative politeness. For example, we have a so-called year-end gift-giving tradition in which we exchange/send gifts with/to a friend or boss from work. When they hand the gift, they say つまらないものですが・・・(meaning “this is not a good one, though”). The hidden meaning of this expression lies in the politeness(modesty) in our specific culture. If you were to say “This gift is super nice! You’ll like it!!”, the receiver would probably be surprised because you lack humility or virtue. But sometimes Japanese people do to people from different cultures.
Also, in my Japanese class (I teach Japanese at McGill), my students are supposed to learn the politest language forms in the textbook. However, as some of my students started to take Japanese because of animation or manga, they are more familiar with the low varieties of Japanese, and actually which is the forms they want to learn more. Since I was often asked about the low varieties of Japanese language after class or even during the class, I try to introduce them to my students as often as possible.