Politeness strategies employed in Call Centre Interactions in Jordan

This study is an attempt to examine systematically the types of politeness strategies employed in the interactions between Jordanians and the employees of the call-centre customer service (CCCS) of a major telecommunications company in Jordan, Connect Jordan (CJ). It aims to provide essential information about the sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics of Jordanian Arabic. Accordingly, it will fill a gap in the sociopragmatics literature through investigating Jordanians’ politeness strategies. It focuses on the Jordanians’ politeness strategies taking into account some social variables such as gender, time, dialectal differences, reason for calling and the employees’ experience that may be significant in selecting an appropriate strategy. Thus, the objectives of the study are to explore whether these variables have any role in choosing a particular politeness strategy. For data collection for this qualitative study, the researcher used a triangulation method. The data have been obtained through recordings of naturally occurring interactions and individual interviews. The study included 28 participants, CCCS employees and customers. The theoretical framework adopted for this study was mainly that of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model of politeness. However, Leech’s (2014) theory of interaction was referred to where relevant. The analysis of the data has shown that there is a preference among Jordanians for the use of negativepoliteness strategies to other strategies as they seemed to dominate the scene in making requests. In addition, honorificity is a striking feature of the employees’ politeness strategies in both requests and responses. The results of the study have also revealed that participants adhered to sociocultural norms of the Jordanian society including Islamic culture which indicates that the acquisition of these norms is essential for learners of Jordanian Arabic. Moreover, the results of the analysis have shown that gender variation and reason for calling play significant roles in the choice of the speaker’s politeness strategy whereas the roles of the dialectal differences and the experience of the employees were minor to a certain degree. The time of calling plays no role in the choice of the politeness strategy in the context of the present study. The main purpose of this study is to contribute to people’s knowledge and understanding of the politeness strategies in terms of the roles of sociocultural factors in the Jordanian society. The results of the study are intended to provide teachers, learners and researchers with essential information about the sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics of Jordanian Arabic.