Prayers as forms of speech act modification in Saudi Hijazi Arabic

Abstract

Prayers (God invocations) are fixed religious terms that are highly frequent and multifunctional in casual and formal conversations among native speakers of Arabic. Examples such as ‘Inshallah’ (God Willing) and ‘Jazak Allah khair (may Allah reward you) are specific to Arabic in a way that makes them difficult to translate into other languages (Shammas, 2005). Muslim societies, even the ones whose first language is not Arabic, use them in their everyday speech. They are also found to be used by non-Muslim native Arabic speakers, suggesting that such phrases are widely used among Arabs regardless of their religious affiliations (Clift & Helani, 2010). Such expressions were identified by different names in the literature; examples include “Allah lexicon” (Morrow, 2006), “God-wishes” (Ferguson, 1983), “Arabic God-phrases” (Welji, 2012), and “religious formulas” (Migdadi & Badarneh, 2013). They will be referred to as prayers in this paper. In addition to their typical function as religious expressions, prayers have been demonstrated in pragmatic studies (Al-Khalifa, 2024; Alqahtani, 2024; Al-Rojaie, 2021; Al-Saeedi, 2019) to be strategically employed as linguistic tactics to achieve politeness. Drawing its theoretical background from Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962), this study aims to determine whether these prayers are used in some or all of the speech act types created by Searle (1969). These are classified as “Assertives” (e.g., statements, conclusions, claims, reports); “Directives” (e.g., requests, commands, suggestions, giving advice); “Commissives” (e.g., promises, offers, vows, guarantees); “Expressives” (e.g., thanks, apologies, congratulations, compliments, praises, curses); and “Declarations” (e.g., “I now pronounce you husband and wife”). The study will also investigate the main pragmatic functions/illocutionary roles of prayers within various speech act sets in the speech of Arabic native speakers, particularly in Saudi Hijazi Arabic.