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.