Politeness in Multicultural Settings: Examining Gender and Politeness Strategies of University Students

Abstract

Cameroon is culturally highly diversified, complexly multilingual with a colonial history as well as socio-economic that are liable to affect its politeness norms and practices. The country is a host to more than two hundred tribes and ethnic groups and its university campuses are a fertile arena for the conglomeration of members of these ethnic groups. This study is aimed at examining the politeness strategies used by male and female students in the University of Bamenda in their daily communications. The paradigm that underlined this study is Paul Grice’s Conversational Maxim. The adopted instruments for the elicitation of data for the work were the questionnaire and a discourse completion task. The judgmental sampling method was adopted to select the 20 participants for the study. To attain the objectives, the researchers employed descriptive statistics, the independent t-test, and Pearson Correlation coefficient test to analyse the collected data. The findings indicated that there was a statistically non-significant difference among the politeness strategies used by male and female students in the University of Bamenda. This is an indication that both males and females use politeness strategies in their communication. The strategies they use include; bold on record, positive politeness, negative politeness and off record politeness strategies.