Soft-boiled Speech: a Contrastive Analysis of Euphemisms in Algerian and Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

The present contrastive study is geared mainly towards probing into the euphemistic language that Algerian and Jordanian Arabic speakers resort to when certain tabooed topics and concepts are brought to the fore. Intriguingly, such an analysis was done in the light of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory. To this end, the data were elicited by dint of two questionnaires which were prepared by first collecting the needed euphemisms from the native speakers of the two dialects under scrutiny