Do females speak more politely to females among Hong Kong young generations?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate politeness strategies among the same and cross - gender conversation among Hong Kong young generations. To find out the effect of gender in politeness strategies of whether females speak more politely to females than to males, nine scenarios are design to elicit conversations. The scenarios include the topics of making complaints, apologizing and offering comfort. These scenarios are based on the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and are distributed to 30 females and 20 males aged between 20 to 25 who are undergraduate students at universities in Hong Kong. The result shows that females speak more politely to females than to males. Moreover, it is found that no matter what the gender of the speaker is, they both speak more politely to females rather than to males. Therefore our study suggests that the gender of the listeners is the major factor affecting the use of politeness strategies of the speakers.