Intercultural sociolinguistics and communication research in South Africa: Its relevance to academic settings and the service industry

Cross-cultural linguistic realization of politeness: A study of apologies in English and Setswana

“…The service industry (hospitality, retail, call centers) is one area where awareness-raising on the use appropriate requesting behavior in lopsided power-relations instances, such as waiter(ress)-customer, shop assistantcustomer, switchboard operator-client and many other situations of subordinates-superordinates, or vice-versa may be very useful (Ervin-Trip 1976;Kasanga 2001 We draw attention to a much neglected aspect in the lopsided power relations: the necessity to raise awareness of those in position of power, especially in gate-keeping situations, for example in job interviews, where the potential for miscommunicative consequences (Gumperz 1982a(Gumperz , 1982b arising from cross-cultural differences is very high. Findings in cross-linguistic realization of apology and politeness may be used to alert gate-keepers to the inevitability of differences in pragmatic competence and/or choice of pragmatic strategies between their variety of language (e. g., standard British English) in contrast to other varieties (e. g., nativized varieties of English in Africa).…”

“…The use of English in South Africa, indeed, varies significantly across speech communities: over time, new varieties (see Coetzee-van Rooy and van Rooy 2005;Kasanga 2001Kasanga , 2005Makalela 2004; articles in the following: World Englishes 21 (1); Multilingua 17 (2/3); de Klerk 1996) have emerged in the Outer Circle of Kachru's (1982) concentric circles model of Englishes, which corresponds to varieties of English as a second language. The other two circles are the Inner and the Expanding Circles, representing respectively English spoken natively and English as a foreign language.…”

“…If any, sociolinguistic and pragmatic differences exist between ETEs closest to British English and those closest to American English, as Ervin-Tripp's (1972, 1976) research on American English suggests. In contrast, much evidence has been uncovered (e. g., Chick 1986Chick , 1989Chick , 1991de Kadt 1998a;Kasanga 2001Kasanga , 2006 of significant pragmatic differences between native (SAE especially) and non-native varieties of English, especially BSAE.…”

“…Consequently, university campuses have, in recent years, played host to language-related research on: pragmatics and intercultural communication (de Kadt 1998a;Kasanga 2001Kasanga , 2003, language shift and identity (de Kadt 2005), politeness and gender (Ige and de Kadt 2002), gender and discourse (de Klerk and Hunt 2000), code-switching (Ramsay-Brijball 1999), and this list is not exhaustive. We therefore followed this trend.…”

“…At the initial stage of the data gathering work for the whole SANPAD project, a decision was taken to abandon the collection of requests and apologies in the native variety of English spoken in South Africa, generally referred to as South African English (SAE), given that the small SAE sample offered no new insights, but rather showed striking sameness in the realization of these two speech acts in SAE (see also Kasanga 2001Kasanga , 2003 and other close varieties of English, especially the varieties of English known as the "southern group" 6 . At the initial stage of the data gathering work for the whole SANPAD project, a decision was taken to abandon the collection of requests and apologies in the native variety of English spoken in South Africa, generally referred to as South African English (SAE), given that the small SAE sample offered no new insights, but rather showed striking sameness in the realization of these two speech acts in SAE (see also Kasanga 2001Kasanga , 2003 and other close varieties of English, especially the varieties of English known as the "southern group" 6 .…”