A Sociolinguistic Study of Cultural Effects on Speech Acts in the South and West of Saudi Arabia’s Community

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the speech act of welcoming unexpected guests in the Hijaz and Al-Janoub communities in Saudi Arabia. Discourse Completion Task (DCT) is adopted to gather the required data, where all the questions are open-ended questions. The study investigates how gender of the host/guest affects the welcoming speech act of an unexpected guest and what the strategies contribute to welcoming an unexpected guest in Hijaz and Al-Janoub areas. It also focuses on the significant impact of religious values among Saudis. Selected coding schemes of Ebrahimi, Pirbabaei and Mehrabad (2015), Al-Zubaidi (2012), Setin (2018), and Allami (2012) are utilized for the data analysis of this study. The results show that both of the above communities, whether males or females, accept unexpected guests. It has been revealed that language, gender, and religion have a great impact on the results of this study. The majority of the female participants opt out of communicative patterns that show rejection to welcoming strange or relative male in some situations where they are visited by a strange male or relative from the opposite sex while they are alone at home.