Apology strategies and gender: A Pragmatic study of apology speech acts in Urdu language

In this paper it has been tried to study apology speech acts in Urdu with the special reference to the gender. How different genders express apologies in different situations, is the main focus of this paper. The data is collected through an open questionnaire from the students of National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad in 2010. The questionnaire consists of ten social situations and in each situation the respondent has committed an offence to someone and is asked to apologize with that person. The offence affected persons belong to different social backgrounds and have different relations with the respondents from more formal to more informal. There is also the difference between the age of the respondent and his/her interlocutors and also in the degree of offence committed. Keeping in mind the time limits, 25 students (15 males and 10 females) were chosen for the data collection. Data has been analyzed with the help of the model proposed in the project of Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Pattens which was initiated in 1982 by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). The findings reveal that girls seemed to be more conscious about their face wants and they used less dangerous strategies even with their friends and siblings more than the boys. However while apologizing in formal settings both adopted similar types of strategies.