Mock Impoliteness in Saudi Arabia: Strategies of Evil Cursing

Abstract

The current paper explores evil curses in the Bani Buhair tribe, which is located in the southwestern part of Saudi Arabia. It shows that cursing in Bani Buhair is a well-constructed speech act that follows linguistic rules and patterns. Buhairi cursers formulate their evil curse constructions by deriving verbs from the consonants of the roots of the preceding words in the discourse. These derivational strategies are of four types: (i) full morphological derivation with full semantics, (ii) full morphological derivation with different semantics, (iii) partial morphological derivation with different semantics, and (iv) full morphological derivation with no semantics. Analyzing the evaluations of these evil curses by cursers, cursees, and two witnesses from the audiences, the paper argues that evil curses are non-impolite phrases that reinforce solidarity between Buhairi in-groups. The paper demonstrates that Haugh and Bousfield’s (2012) model of mock impoliteness accommodates evil curses better than the other dominant politeness and impoliteness models, proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and Culpeper (1996) respectively.