Towards a definition of Egyptian complimenting

Abstract

Compliments are often viewed within the framework of politeness theory. Work on politeness, such as that of Brown and Levinson (1987), has, however, often been infected with a western ethnocentrism, such that cross cultural variations are assumed to be captured within a single politeness model. Recent research on cultures such as Chinese and Japanese have challenged this ethnocentric perspective, and the present work extends the critique in relation to Egyptian Arabic. In the paper, we argue that compliments are culture specific objects. In the case of Egyptian Arabic, any understanding of compliment behavior must take account of such things as values, tact, courtesy, and general group, as opposed to individual, values. Working with a range of compliment behaviours we introduce a model of a ‘social contract of values’ which allows us to move beyond western ethnocentrism, and to capture more directly the process of Egyptian complimenting behavior.