POLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY L2 TURKISH SPEAKERS IN MAKING REQUESTS

Acquiring native-like sociolinguistic competence is more difficult to achieve than acquiring linguistic competence. Olstain & Weinbach (1993) define sociolinguistic competence as the ability to interact culturally as well as pragmatically appropriate ways. If non-native speakers transfer their native language pragmatics or cultural norms into the target language, their utterances may not achieve their goals due to sociolinguistic (in)appropriateness. Although we cannot judge pragmatic competence as correct or incorrect, we can clearly recognize pragmatic failure as a situation where a speaker cannot express himself in a socially appropriate manner; different from a situation where the speaker constructs a grammatically incorrect sentence (Thomas, 1983). The present paper investigates and evaluates sociolinguistic competence of non-native Turkish speakers. For this aim, the study analyzes the results of a questionnaire completed by adult speakers who already are advanced speakers of Turkish as a second/foreign language. The participants were asked to write what they would say in certain social situations. The same questionnaire was also given to native speakers of Turkish for comparison purposes. The analysis reveals that adult speakers learning Turkish tend to be too polite and give more importance to apparent non-coerciveness over pragmatic clarity. The culturally specific contexts which require knowledge of culture and social roles causes some problems for L2 speakers as illustrated by their sociolinguistically inappropriate choice of second person formal/ informal distinction in Turkish. The analysis reveals that cultural differences play a crucial role in language use and sociolinguistic competence does not always mirror linguistic competence.