This collection of 19 papers celebrates the coming of age of the field of politeness studies now in its 30th year It begins with an investigation of the meaning of politeness especially linguistic politeness and presents a short history of the field of linguistic politeness studies showing how such studies go beyond the boundaries of conventional linguistic work incorporating as they do non language insights The emphasis of the volume is on non Western languages and the ways linguistic politeness is achieved with them Many if not most studies have focused on Western languages but the languages highlighted here show new and different aspects of the phenomena The purpose of linguistic politeness is to aid in successful communication throughout the world and this volume offers a balance of geographical distribution not found elsewhere including Japanese Thai and Chinese as well as Greek Swedish and Spanish It covers such theoretical topics as face wakimae social levels gender related differences in language usage directness and indirectness and intercultural perspectives
