The first steps towards the first-order politeness research in Udmurt

One of the most common stereotypes seemed to be connected to the length of the answers. In many cases my informants considered someone a woman if the answer was long and considered someone a man if the answer was short. Their explanation was that women usually speak a lot more than man: they explain the situation much more in details, or they are more polite, and being polite elongates the speech. On the other hand, men usually don't speak more than necessary. However, some of the explanations contradicted each other: they agreed on that part that the speaker is male, as he gave short responses, but some of them said that this is typical to young man, as they don't really like to speak, while others said that short answers are typical for old men for multiple reasons: they don't have to explain themselves, they do not have time to be polite as they have too much work to do, or because of their age they are tired, and do not want to spend too much energy on explaining themselves.

What seemed to be another often used stereotype was that if a person is less polite that they would have expected in that situation or not polite at all then they are young and/or male. They usually used the Russian word дерзкий (or the „Udmurtised” дерзкой) to explain this kind of behavior. According to the Russian Explanatory Dictionary [1] the meaning of this word can be `disrespectful', 'rude', 'defiant', 'recklessly brave', `desperate' or `risky'. So, in this situation it means something like `someone who dares to breach the norm'. The informants seemed to agree that the less polite someone is, the younger they are, but it seemed to be random when it was considered a male property. There weren't specific answers that would have triggered this decision.

Another common stereotype used by the informants: if someone uses forms mainly used in the standard variant of the Udmurt language, then that person is from either from the capital city of the Udmurt Republic, Izhevsk or from Deri region (the region that surrounds Izhevsk). As Kozmacs [13, p. 67] mentions the institutes associated with standardization were the newspapers, the printing houses, the TV and radio programs and the Udmurt theatre. Also, the Udmurt State University (where the Institute of Udmurt Philology, Finno-Ugristics and Journalism is located) and the Udmurt Institute of History, Language and Literature, which is the Udmurt Research Centre of the Uralic Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences can be found in this city. So Izhevsk is a cultural and scientific center of Udmurtia. This makes it understandable, why they associate the standard language with this city. However, this doesn't mean that they would use the standard variant of the language only here.

The last two stereotypes are both connected to the female speakers. The first is emotionality. Some of my informants said, that they guessed some of the speakers to be a woman, because they gave emotional answers. The other stereotype was triggered by one verb: gacacbKHCbKO 'I am getting ready'. Two of my informants decided the gender of the speaker by the fact that she explains being late by the fact that she was getting ready.

Of course, these stereotypes are not Udmurt language specific ones. Some of them are listed by Mills [19], who researched the connections between gender and politeness, as well. She mentions that women are usually considered more polite then man, as two of the main stereotypes about the women's behavior is trying to avoid conflict and being cooperative [19, p. 203]. She also mentions Holmes' [12] theory, that for women the way they express themselves is also very important, while for men the most important thing is the exchange of information. Mills also mentions [19, p. 221] that there is a stereotype that women tend to use excessive amount of politeness forms, and expressions related to politeness.

The time needed for getting ready is also a stereotype commonly associated with women. It is an often-used element of movies, jokes, or memes, so we cannot say, that it would be a specific Udmurt stereotype. However, in Russia it is a bit more intensive. A commonly used characterization about women from Russia is that they seem to go even to the shops with full makeup and in their finest dresses. Usually it is explained by the idea that in the Second World War the country lost a lot of men on the battlefields, so the girls always have to show their topnotch form so they will have a chance to find a husband.

It is also common that the capital city of a country (or in the case of the Udmurt, the capital of a republic within the federation) is associated with the standard language. Smakman [25, p. 42] mentions the case of Tokyo. He writes that in Japan mistakenly the Tokyo variant is considered by many as the standard variant of Japanese. The reason behind this is that Tokyo is the largest city, a cultural and industrial hub of Japan, and the most prominent university is found there. This perfectly falls in line with the situation of the Udmurt language.

Summary

Although there were always one or two people among my informants who perceived the answers completely differently than the others, it is safe to say that the speakers usually agreed on what is polite and what is impolite. The biggest disagreement was in the case of the interpretation of the use of the second past form. According to the theory, the use of it would indicate politeness, as the speaker tries to minimize the threat on his/her own face by emphasizing that the he/she did not have any control over the action. Some of the speakers considered these forms more polite than the first past form, correlating with the theory, but another group of the speakers felt that the emphasizing the lack of control makes the apology impolite, as they try to sneak out of the responsibility. This is definitely a topic that should be looked deeper into in a future research. In my opinion one of the best ways to examine this could be a research from a dialectic point of view, because it is quite probable, that this difference can be in connection with how widespread the use of the second past form is in the given dialect (the speakers of the southern dialect tend to use it more than the speakers of the northern dialect). It could be also compared to the interpretation of the use of this verb form in the Tatar language, which has affected and still does affect the Udmurt language, and has the same linguistic phenomenon. The informants usually did not really feel any problems with the Russian codeswitching; they said that it is quite common that Udmurts speak like this, especially the representatives of the younger generation. In the case of the answer that was included because of its impolite manner has been described by some informants as Russian effect. In my opinion in this case it is not exactly Russian what should be interpreted, but rather foreign, not Udmurt. They did not say it is Russian, because it would definitely be a Russian characteristic phenomenon to be rude, just not typical for Udmurt, therefore unfamiliar. As Russian is a language which has a huge influence on the Udmurt language it could have been the reason behind the assumption, that being rude is a Russian influence as well.

In the second part of my research I was interested in whether the speakers can identify any social group of the speakers based on their language use. Based on my results I can say that they could not really identify the speakers. The close relative could not identify the main informant's characteristics correctly, although he/she meets him/her on a daily basis. On the other hand the main informant correctly identified the characteristics of “himself/herself', and his/her reasoning was Moh ho 03bbi eepacan 'I would say the same way' I would give the same answers. but did not realise how close he/she was to the truth, as those were his/her answers. The informants' answers in average were as close as if they would have blindly guessed the answers. However, except for one speaker no one said that it is not possible to identify the speakers age, gender, dialect, and place of origin, and they also grouped the answers based on which one of them could belong to the same person. As it was visible, in case of the age and the gender they almost always relied on stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes were quite specific, but some of them were more opaque and the same reasoning could be used for different groups. Based on this research with ten informants I would not draw far-reaching conclusions, maybe a bigger study with more informants would bring a different results, but as for now it implies that actually there is no specific social group of speakers that would have such a specific way of language use that differentiates them from the others easily.

References

language politeness speaker sociopragmatic

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