A Comparative Study of Request Strategies in Punjabi Culture and English Language

Author(s) : Adeel Khalid

Abstract:

This study’s objective is to highlight a range of politeness strategies used in the Punjabi language and to implicate how requests are made in the Punjabi language and culture for meaningful interaction and effective communication as it is required to use certain linguistic and non-linguistic strategies. The objective of this study is to investigate the relevancy of Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness in the context of Punjab and to explore widely used request strategies in the Punjabi language and culture. The study also delves into the comparison of these request strategies with British English speakers. The role plays were adopted from Márquez-Reiter (2000) which consisted of twelve situations and were translated into the Punjabi language. The data were coded following the framework of Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989). The findings revealed that both the British English and the Punjabi language respondents used a variety of strategies to make the request and to sound themselves as polite beings. These findings implicate that there is a need to teach pragmatic competence, especially request strategies, and that they would need to take ownership of their rich Punjabi culture, tradition, and heritage.
Keywords: Punjabi language and culture, politeness, request strategies, intercultural pragmatics