A Cross-Cultural Study of Apologies in British English and Persian

Abstract

Most cross-cultural apology studies have investigated apologies across different languages based on a corpus of elicited data. Rarely have apologies been examined in the natural data; nor have the social offenses that obligated these apologies been considered. This study investigated the use of apology strategies, and also the offenses that motivated apologies among native speakers of British English and Persian by analyzing a large corpus of naturally-occurring data collected from real-life situations. Results indicated that both English and Persian speakers used relatively the same set of apology strategies, yet with significantly different preferences. In addition, it was also found that the two groups did not make apologies to remedy the same offense types and even the same offenses obligated different apology rates.