Face, Politeness and African Culture: The Hausa Example

Abstract

A meaningful life often entails deep relationships and effective communication with our families, loved ones, and friends. However, close contact usually also comes with relationship disappointments and expectancy violations. Interpersonal relationships and their challenges and frictions have come to stay because even if we do not venture out of our homes, the places for people to meet, socialise, and date are changing; hence, there is a need for interpersonal relationship management through communication. This paper explores the dynamics of face, politeness, and African culture from a pragmatic perspective, drawing examples from the Hausa language of Northern Nigeria. This paper concludes that every ethnolinguistic group has its own established conventions regarding the utterances and actions of its members, which are regarded as polite or impolite. Despite these differences, there are grounds for similarities in how these diverse cultures perceive politeness. Also, that politeness can be achieved through employing paralinguistic and extra linguistic features like soft voice and silence; there is an asymmetrical nature of face negotiation between interactants depending on their status.