A cross-cultural analysis of disagreement strategies in Algerian and Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This study aims to explore the use of disagreement strategies in two Arabic dialects: Jordanian and Algerian Arabic. It also investigates the effect of social status on the choice of disagreement strategies adopting Muntigl’s and Turnbull’s (1998) taxonomy. To achieve these objectives, 40 participants (20 Jordanians and 20 Algerians) were randomly recruited to respond to a discourse completion task (DCT). The participants were requested to read six situations and to react to them by making disagreements with people of higher, equal and lower statuses. A mixed-method approach was used to analyse the data. The results showed that the participants in the two study groups share similar preferences in the use of two main disagreement strategies that scored the highest in High to Low, Low to High, and in Equal statuses. The findings are discussed in the light of (im)politeness and provide implications for socio-pragmatic research in Arabic linguistics.