A cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic

This study investigates the apology strategies used by the speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic. The various strategies used by the two groups, in addition to the causes of any potential differences, constitute the crux of the analysis. American and Jordanian respondents have been found to differ in their use of apology strategies. Differences involve using several manifestations of explicit apology among other less explicit apology strategies. The authors further examined the differences between male and female respondents in both groups and found that there were more differences between Jordanian male and female respondents than between American male and female respondents, which may be attributed to the fact that there is a greater similarity between how boys and girls are raised in the U.S. than between how they are raised in Jordan. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.