Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004

Becoming Aware of Differences: Positve and Negative Politeness Cultures

Rosie McAndrew, Embassy Schools, UK

I was giving a PowerPoint presentation on Positive and Negative Politeness Cultures at a conference recently, and Mario was one of the participants. Following on from the seminar, he asked me if I would contribute an article for HLT on how I became interested in cultural differences, and so here it is…

As far as I can remember, the effects of culture on language first impinged on my consciousness when I was about fifteen. My parents were negotiating an exchange visit with the French pen friend I had acquired, and my fourth-form knowledge of the language was called upon to gather the gist of her mother's side of the correspondence. I got the general idea of dates, times, and descriptions of the family, but I was left almost totally bemused by the flourish of her complimentary close: 'Veuillez agreer, Madame, l'expression de mes sentiments les meilleurs'. I eventually discovered that this translated loosely as 'Be so kind as to accept the expression of my best feelings', but although this is merely the equivalent of our 'Yours sincerely' combined with 'Best wishes', it was embellished with such a daunting subjunctive invocation that it seemed unnecessarily ornate and formal to me, at that age and in that situation.

I was soon to discover that my pen friend's family did indeed come from a more sophisticated bracket than my own. They had a maid, who, by means of a foot-operated bell push, would be summoned discreetly by Madame to remove the dishes at the end of each of the many courses at the elaborate dining table. And after dinner each day would come the obligatory withdrawal to the drawing room for coffee, where I would have to endure partially understood and semi-articulate conversation with Madame, Monsieur and the other members of the family, all separated from each other's vision by strategically placed pot plants.

So maybe that family was particularly formal, but nonetheless, I was assured that at that time, her letter ending was perfectly typical of the accepted form.

Much later, I was to experience language use at the other end of the continuum, and find myself equally inadequate as a participant. I was living in Guyana, married to a Guyanese and loving the experience of acquiring the intonation, lexis and grammar of Creolese. Those parts of the language were not the problem at all. But when it came to interaction on the pragmatic level, particularly as regards asking people to do things, it was a different story.

I would go into a 'cake' shop (a little shop selling much more than cakes), where there would be a cluster of people at the counter. I would place myself behind whoever I took to be the latest arrival – not an easy matter to decide, this, as there was no indication of a queue. But it wouldn't make any difference where I stood, as people would come in later than me, push past me without appearing to notice my presence, and call out such exponents of the function of 'Request' as: 'Gimme a pack o' match!', 'Gimme a slice o' cheese!', or 'Gimme one cigrit!'.

You may be struck initially, and humbled, as I was, by the economic implications of being able to buy individual cigarettes, or cheese by the slice, but what had me atrophied was the means of address. And though I lived in Guyana for nearly five years altogether, and my imitations of the music and syntax of Guyanese Creolese were considered pretty accurate after the first year or so, and though I could render such requests as 'Gimme one cigrit!' perfectly in an anecdotal context, I never made it to a position where I could use them appropriately in a cake shop.

Likewise, while I was working, I had someone to look after my daughter in the afternoons. (Social squeamishness still prevents me from feeling comfortable with the word 'maid', which Guyanese of all classes would use without compunction to describe this role!) Anyway, occasionally I would want to ask her to do something differently to the way she was doing it: difficult task, this, for someone so ill at ease with hierarchical distinctions – so I would, in my English way, prevaricate with such forms as 'I would do it like this.', even prefacing this with what I would have thought was the unambiguous 'If I were you,…'. But nothing happened. No change was made. She went on doing whatever it was just as she had been doing it all along. She tended to be taciturn anyway, but might even reply with an uninterested-sounding 'Oh, yes?', and I came to realise that she was responding to the propositional meaning of my statement; i.e., I was telling her, in the interests of comparison, that if I were doing it I would do it in a different way. And that was that. if I wanted her to do something, I would have to say: 'Do it like this', even if I salvaged my conscience with a prefatory 'please'.

So I guess it was out of such contrasts that my awareness of and interest in cultural linguistic differences emerged, and I was later fascinated to find that the subject had been researched and documented and codified under such names as 'Positive and Negative politeness'…(see particularly Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987)

Rosie McAndrew
Teacher Training Co-ordinator, Embassy CES, Hastings.