Politeness in Saudi WhatsApp Family Groups: A Digital Pragmatic Analysis of Facework, Religious Formulae, and Intergenerational Hierarchies in Mobile Messaging Discourse
Keywords:
politeness, WhatsApp, family communication, digital pragmatics, Saudi Arabia, face management, Islamic discourseAbstract
This study examines politeness phenomena in WhatsApp family group conversations in Saudi Arabia, analyzing a corpus of 45 family group conversation logs collected over a two-month observation period. Grounded in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, Watts’ (2003) concept of politic behavior, and recent developments in digital and computer-mediated discourse analysis (Locher, 2010; Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015), the study investigates how politeness is locally constructed within technologically mediated, culturally embedded interactional contexts. The analysis reveals a distinctive politeness ecology shaped by the interaction of traditional Saudi communicative norms, Islamic discourse conventions, and the affordances of the WhatsApp platform, particularly its multimodal features such as text, voice notes, emojis, and asynchronous participation. Findings indicate that voice messages are strategically employed for high face-risk communicative acts, including requests, refusals, and sensitive interpersonal negotiations, as they index heightened sincerity and relational commitment. Islamic blessings and formulaic religious expressions function as routinized politeness rituals that reinforce solidarity, mitigate potential face threats, and anchor interaction in shared moral and cultural frameworks. The study further identifies systematic management of intergenerational face hierarchies, wherein younger participants often employ selective participation, heightened deference strategies, and code-switching between Arabic varieties and English to navigate authority relations within family groups. These practices demonstrate that politeness in digital family discourse is not merely a transfer of offline norms but a dynamically reconfigured system shaped by platform affordances and sociocultural ideology. The study contributes to digital pragmatics, cross-cultural politeness research, and mediated discourse analysis by illuminating how facework is recalibrated in mobile messaging environments.
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