Politeness in Turkish Language by People Living in Jovein in Comparison to Persian Language

Abstract

Language reflects the context in which it is used. We adapt our talk to suit our audience and talk differently to children, customers and colleagues. And all these are also dependant on our speech community. Politeness is a criterion of civilization. It directs the activities of human being. Being a social activity, language is also restrained by this criterion. There are different polite norms in different social groups. In this paper, polite verbal behavior of Turkish people living in Jovein , a city in Iran,is considered with contributions from intercultural communication, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies. This study examines the understanding of politeness phenomena in Jovein. Accordingly, two speech acts namely, request and apology are studied to see the participants’ perception and interpretation of the linguistic actions. These speech acts are selected due to their common occurrence in every day human interaction. The study is on the basis of the Grice’s Cooperative Principles (CP) and Politeness Principles of Leech. The basic view of this paper is that there are differences between Turkish and Persian polite verbal behavior and that these differences originate from a different culture. To understand verbal behavior in different cultures better, we need to learn about the Turkish people’s culture.

Keywords: politeness ,culture, Turkish people