“Politeness and Regional Language Ideology in California”

Julia Adams

Middlebury Institute of International Studies

Introduction

            Through media and my own experiences, I grew to have an ideology that Midwesterners tend to speak more indirectly and more self-effacingly, while East Coasters speak more directly and practically. In my defense, my bias is based in many instances of interacting and living with East Coasters and not just the television. After moving to California, I began to wonder how Californian language ideologies fit on the scale from polite to impolite. Do Californians consider themselves polite? What do they think of the rest of the country? How do they show politeness?

In Bremner’s review of politeness, “Politeness and Face Research”, politeness is defined with a three-pronged approach, politeness as a tool for avoiding conflict in social interactions, a demonstration of consideration for the other party and shared social values, and a ritual of setting and following the rules to build trust (Brenmer, 2012). Connected to these notions of politeness is the notion of face. Goffman defines it as “the positive social value of a person effectively claims for himself . . . (1967).  People can lose face by not living up to others’ expectations for them. They can save face, and make excuses to try to bridge the divide between how they act and how they want to be perceived. They can even do face work, where they can try to defend their own face and/or protect someone else’s face in an interaction. In the article, “Intercultural tact versus intercultural tact”, Janney and Ardnt state that “threats to face, whether intended, accidental or only imagined, are the basis of most interpersonal conflicts (1992, p. 28). One definition of politeness given by Brenmer emphasizes its role in avoiding conflict, so face work and politeness are tightly linked.

However, a face-threatening situation is not necessarily an argument. Levinson and Brown, drawing upon their two definitions of face, identify many kinds of face-threatening situations. A common one they describe is when one person threatens the other’s negative face, their autonomy, through orders, requests, advice, reminders, warnings and threats etc (1987, p. 66). However, even a compliment can be face-threatening if the complimented feels he must either return in kind or downplay the complimented factor (1987, p. 66).  Strategies for face work in potentially face-threatening situations are to “give hints/clues . . . understate, overstate, use tautologies, .  . be ambiguous . . . use ellipsis.” (Brown, Levinson, 1987 p. X,). As Brown and Levinson discuss in, social distance, relative power, and the amount of imposition in a face-threatening act are key factors in how people approach politeness (1987 p. 15). As the title fo their work suggests, Brown and Levinson emphasize these strategies are universal and use examples of research from the U.S, Japan, India and other locations.  My goal was to investigate how Californians use and view strategies in face-threatening situations, thereby exploring their language ideology and its relation to politeness.

Methodology

For my inquiry into Californian’s language ideologies towards politeness, I administered a brief questionnaire during an eight to fifteen-minute interview. In this questionnaire, I presented Californians with a face threatening situation. In the scenario, the participant plays a student, whose professor has made a mistake that impacts the students’ grade negatively. The situation forces participants to navigate unequal power relationships, social distance, and imposing a request.  The professor has power over the student, social distance exists due to that power differential and the student is making a request that threatens both the negative aspect of the professor’s face, requesting he take an action, and the positive aspect, undermining the professor’s desire to be a good professor. I presented this scenario to interviewees, and then had them answer questions about why they answered the way they did, how they showed politeness, and how they thought showing politeness varies across the U.S.

Then, I showed them five sample answers to the situation they were just presented. My sample answers came from five individuals from different regions of the U.S: Michigan, Vermont, Texas, Tennessee, and California. I did not tell participants where each answer came from. My goal was not to measure their accuracy in identifying speaker’s homestate or their reactions to a region’s language. My goal was to investigate their perceptions about those regions’ language and politeness as well as their perceptions about their own regions’. My reasoning was that they would chose the “ruder” answers and assign them to the regions they viewed as rudest, regardless of how rude that region actually may be. My sample answers were written down, instead of audio to eliminate accent as a factor. I also wanted to emphasize that showing politeness is not done just by how we say something but also by what we say. Participants were asked to rank these five sample responses in order of politeness and give reasons why.  They were then asked which response was the most empowering and which was the least. Finally, participants had to try to guess which response belonged to which region.

 

My participants were six female self-identified Californians. I did not randomly select my participants because of my method of inquiry, my questionnaire and interview. I and my participant had to be seated in a quiet area; I could not stand on a street corner and get a more random sampling. Instead, I asked around locations near the Middlebury Institute of International Studies including the Samson Center, Starbucks, Café Lumiere, and the William Tell Coleman Library. My participants were consequently all the kind of people who go to coffee shops. They were all between twenty-two and fifty, connected to educations, and appeared female. Despite attempts to diversify my pool, time constraints required I make gender a control variable rather than a moderating variable. Additionally, I did not ask where in Californian participants identified from. The interregional differences still came up in some interviews, and if I were to conduct my interviews again, I would have asked, but as a new arrival to California, I did not know about this distinction. Thus, the language ideologies I discovered are interesting, but may not be fully representative of Californians in general, and relate to female Californians in particular.

Given my participants, my identity often manifested to allow me to be considered more of an “in-group” member. Firstly, I used a lot of the face work and politeness strategies my respondents were to be asked about in the interview in my approach. My approach may have influenced responders to think about politeness more than they otherwise would have. Secondly, I am female and so were all my respondents. We had a shared identity to build a rapport around. One respondent even said that she thought of politeness as more gendered than regional. Would she have felt comfortable saying that if I were male? I also used my identity as a M.I.I.S student to facilitate the process by differentiating myself from a random hassling stranger. Identifying myself as a student of a perceived liberal institution may have influenced participants to want to be more “p.c” or politely correct. However, it may have also given me some in-group knowledge. Another respondent told me that she though politeness differed less among regions and more among education levels, meaning the more educated the politer. Consequently, my identity prompted some responders to share interesting opinions I did not design the questionnaire to elicit.

My Findings 

As can be seen by looking above, interviewees’ responses to the scenario were all worded differently, but most participants valued indirectness in their own answers and in others, utilizing a strategy of giving hints, association clues, and presuppositions that Brown and Levinson reference as a strategy for nonthreatening face-threatening (1987, p. 214). Respondents never directly stated the professor made a mistake. Many explained their intentions and the circumstances instead, hoping the imaginary professor would get the hint.   Participants were self-aware about this. When asked how their answers were polite, several stressed the importance of not blaming or accusing the professor directly. In fact, several respondents reacted negatively to Sample Answer A (Adams 2016), because it stated “the exam was not correctly graded.” Even though the phrase was in the passive voice, respondents described this as “too direct”, “jumping to conclusions”, “not appropriate.” The stress on indirectness was also reflected in many “extra” words that conveyed affective and social meaning. Many respondents also used language to “soften” their words such as “it looks like”, “maybe”, “I think”, “might”, “may”, “was wondering,” and “I believe.” They also mentioned similar phrases as being polite in the sample answers. All these words buffer the information with uncertainty. That way, participants do not impose and threaten the professor’s negative face (his autonomy) and instead try to appeal to his positive face (his desire to be a good professor). Participants predominantly used a strategy of indirectness in a face-threatening situation and valued it in the sample responses.

In addition, an inconsistency between how respondents answered when presented the scenario and how they judged the sample answers, revealed an ideology around the word “please”.  Interviewees 4,5,6 all emphasized the use of the word “please” in Sample Answer C as making it especially polite. Interviewee 4 went so far as judging sample answers not using please as impolite. However, none of these respondents used please, despite them expressing the desire to be polite in their answers to the scenario. It is possible that they used the word “please” as a way to help them rank politeness in a definitive way, rather than trying to negotiate the subtleties of comparing differing complex wordings. Please is also a very socialized form of politeness, because many parents and teachers force it on children when the children make a demand. Please transforms a demand into a request. Respondents may have grown out of using please and found subtler ways to express the social and affective meaning of respect and request. Yet, they still value it when they see it. Three interviewees’ emphasis on the word “please” as a make-or-break factor for politeness, marks a contradictory language ideology related to socialization.

When ranking sample answers in order of politeness, respondents’ answers varied, but on average, C, E, B, D, A seemed to be the order of preference. Even though only one respondent answered this way exactly, all respondents except Interviewee 5 and Interviewee 1, chose sample answers C, E, B as the three politest in differing orders.  Interviewee 5 was the most deviant respondent. Interviewee 5 was the only respondent to react positively to Sample Response A because she liked the phrase “can I go over it with you and figure out what happened”, and the sharing of responsibility it implied. The language ideology of politeness as not just diverting blame, as almost all sample answers and interviewee answers did, but also as dividing the pressure was interesting. Interviewee 5 also placed an emphasis on using the title of “professor” as way of showing politeness, perhaps because it highlights the professor’s role, authority and therefore his “face”.  Thus, respondents seemed to have somewhat similar shared values towards what constitutes politeness with some interesting deviation in their rankings of responses.

When asked directly about whether they think politeness varies across the U.S, most respondents affirmed that the notion that politeness differs, but they gave varying responses about how California compared to the rest of the country.  For example, Interviewee 1 said that people outside of the West Coast would be less direct than the rest of the country, while Interviewees 3 and 4 others said East Coasters would be more direct. Interviewee 4 said the East Coast would be more reserved and polite. Perhaps this lack of consensus comes from divisions in what Californian language is. In “The Normative North and the Stigmatized South: Ideology and Methodology in the Perceptual Dialectogy of California”, researchers focused on regional differences within California and found that Northern Californian language and Southern Californian language were perceived as distinct (Bucholz et. al, 2008). Interviewee 5 brought up Southern Californians, in particular people from Los Angeles, as being rude, unprompted.  Because respondents did not agree on whether California’s language is polite, they could not agree on how it compared to the rest of the country or on whether the rest of the country was polite. The lack of consensus on whether or not Californian language is polite may be the result of interregional differences rather than intraregional differences, because interregional culture clashes are closer.

When comparing participants purported views on regional variances in politeness, their rankings of most polite to least, and their pairings for answers and their origins, I discovered that my hypothesis was wrong; ideologies connecting politeness and region may not be as defined or strong in California. Many of my participants gave contradictory answers that suggest that they did not consider politeness as a clue for pairing sample answers and with an origin. Interviewee 1 was the only one to think of California as more direct. She then contradicted herself by picking Sample Answer C, the sample answer she said was politest, as the Californian answer. Even more contradictorily, she said she chose C as California because it was like her answer. Sample Answer C and her answer are very different, because hers has far fewer strategies for face-threatening. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Interviewee 4 described Californian language as politer and less direct compared to East Coasters and yet chose the sample answer she described as the most impolite for California (Sample Answer A).  Even more, respondents showed obvious angst over picking states for sample answers, several confessed that they were mostly guessing, and some answers were given by default (there was only one state and one answer left). Consequently, my participants did not draw a connection between the politeness of an answer and the perceived politeness of that region, demonstrating their ideas about differences in language across the U.S may not connect to politeness as much as my own do.

Interpretation

            While Californians I interviewed utilized some relatively universal politeness strategies in language usage discussed by Levinson and Brown, they did not strongly demonstrate language ideologies that emphasize politeness as part of a regional language consistently. To learn more, I would either expand my data into the survey realm or deepen my data by conducting an ethnography. Several researchers have done regional American English language ideology studies with a survey element, including Laura Hartley in “A View from the West Perceptions of U.S Dialects by Oregon Residents” (2011) and “Correctness, Pleasantness and Degree of Difference Rating Across Regions” by Fridland and Bartlett (2006). Also, my research relates heavily to “Methods in (applied) folk linguistics”, studying how nonlinguists “react to varieties of language and language use” (2011, p. 15).  With regards to language ideology research, both ethnographic and survey-based, my work’s emphasis on politeness makes it different. Other research looking at politeness seemed to be more concerned with politeness between two different cultures rather than within variations inside a culture.  Some examples of this kind of research are in Politeness Across Cultures edited by Bargiela Chiappini and Kadar, which compare Korean and U.S politeness, politeness between different languages and more (2011). If were to further this research, I would seek to take an ethnographic view of politeness and focus less on language ideologies than on performance of identities through and because of politeness, taking my investigation into a different realm of sociolinguistics.

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