Abstract-The present study discusses the theories, methods and results of the available literature in the area of linguistic politeness involving i) the use of indirectness and honorifics as politeness strategies, ii) the notion of 'face' as a social image, other social factors and social structure that affect the use of and variation in linguistic forms, and iii) the historical reasons for the emergence of stereotypes in the use of linguistic politeness in a society. The first section discusses the studies based on data from a single language. The second section focus on the studies on Hindi and on Japanese, respectively. The third section describes the work done in cross-cultural studies in politeness. The fourth section describes the research gap that emerges from the discussions in the available literature.