Abstract:

This study examines the notions of indirectness in speech acts as well as politeness strategies of requests among Egyptian Arabic native speakers and Turkish native speakers in their L1. To elicit data on the request strategies, a group of 20 Egyptian and 20 Turkish undergraduate students were randomly chosen to complete a DCT that consisted of ten written situations with different levels of social power and impositions. The results show that in general, conventional indirectness was the most prevailing strategy used by both the Egyptian and the Turkish sample. Second to conventional directness, Egyptian students showed a preference for directness and non-conventional indirectness especially in situations with friends and acquaintances or when there was not a huge imposition on the hearer, whereas Turkish students preferred to use conventional indirectness. In situations where the speaker did not know the hearer very well or when there was a larger imposition, Turkish students showed a preference for non-conventional indirect speech acts while Egyptian students used direct requests slightly more frequent.
The results of this study suggest that pragmatic failure between the two cultures while using the same L2 is unlikely. Pedagogically, the results indicate that both Egyptian and Turkish learners of the examined sample use almost similar strategies of (in)directness to frame polite requests. Thus, it can be concluded that Egyptian and Turkish learners of L2 will likely transfer their L1 similar strategies into their L2. Teachers of English as a new language can expect Egyptian students to be slightly more direct than native English speakers while Turkish students will most likely be more indirect in their requesting style, compared to native English speakers.

Keywords:

Egyptian Arabic, Turkish, politeness, cultural comparison, request strategies, directness, conventional indirectness, non-conventional indirectness, speech acts.