What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet.
Right?
Wrong! At least in the real world, where the terms we use to address each other do mean things.
You probably remember the Wall Street Journal article back in December about Dr Jill Biden’s educational title, and a response to it in Vanity Fair. A lot of the furore that followed on social media focused on the gender issue, a line that I intend to take up again in a future post. But the heated exchange of opinions highlighted the importance of the usage of the address term. For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on two aspects of what a term of address does in communication.
Terms of address is a very complex topic; the choice of a term of address can be a configuration of numerous factors - again whole theses have been written on it. For the purposes of this post, I focus on two of them:
· Age/status difference
· Conceptualisation of familiarity/intimacy and informality/friendliness
Giti, the Iranian friend who featured in the previous post, was a PhD student in the Engineering Dept at UCL, where I often visited her. I noticed that a male Iranian colleague addressed her both as ‘Giti’ and as ‘Ms Z’. At the time I knew next to nothing about Iranians and their communication styles, but I had the makings of a social scientist (i.e. I was perpetually nosey). He explained that he used ‘Giti’ in the presence of other colleagues and when speaking English, but there was absolutely no way he could do than when speaking Persian to her, when he reverted to ‘Ms Z’. I did not understand this, but filed it away for future reference.
Six months later when I started work in Iran Air I thought I had worked it out.
One of the local Iranian colleagues at the airport by the name of Sediqeh Nazarian (her husband's surname, according to the English custom), who had worked along the other local male Iranian employees for a long time, was addressed by them as "Sindy jan" (“dear Sindy”), while she called the guys "Ebi jan" (for Ibrahim) or "Moradi jan" (cf. Sherlock’s “dear Watson”). Meanwhile the English colleague who was actually called John kept wondering why Iranians used his name to address each other! On the other hand, the (religious) managers addressed her as "Mrs Nazarian" and she addressed them as, for example, "Mr Khodakhasteh." When I was introduced, I gave my first name. So when Mrs Nazarian used my first name, I also used "Sindy". That was a faux-pas: she drew herself up to her full height and said, "I am not Sindy; I am Mrs Nazarian!"
It took me some time to work out why. Mrs Nazarian was much older than me; she had known Ebi and Moradi for years and years, so they could use intimate/informal terms among themselves. The managers who were replaced every four years were on formal terms of address with the other Iranians, but used first names with the English/Scottish/Irish colleagues.
Both factors, age and familiarity, were at play. I went wrong in assuming the same reciprocity that she had with her life-long colleagues, and did not compute the difference in our age and the formality that she obviously considered paramount. The bilingual setting and my hybrid status (explained in the previous post) compounded the issue: I thought that since we spoke in English, English conventions of informality among colleagues applied; she probably thought that my hijab appearance ‘classified’ me with the ‘religious’ Iranian personnel who tended towards more formal modes of communication, according to the Iranian practice. The religious Iranian personnel addressed all Iranians by Title and Last name (T + LN), and all British staff and me by first names (FN); they were addressed by Title and Last name by everyone.
The age/status difference is important in my native Greece too. In fact, my postcard home and the comments to the previous post brought up a couple of interesting points in interaction between students and academic staff in Britain and Greece, and show that address terms are a topic well worth exploring in cross-cultural communication. The general tendency seems to be that in societies where age/status difference is culturally important, the difference is encoded in language through address terms; polite address pronouns like vous in French or Lei in Italian; or formal lexical choices as in Persian or Japanese.
The second important factor (informality and intimacy) in the Nazarian example took me a few years to work out. In an English setting, informality and intimacy are quite distinct. In other words, in an informal workplace or educational setting, colleagues, students and members of staff may be on first name terms, but this does not by any means imply that they are also friends. In a 1992 paper, Ide and her colleagues argue that in a culture like the US, where ‘polite’ and ‘friendly’ are perceived as similar concepts, it is easy to switch from the polite TLN (Title + Last Name) to FN (First Name) to address a person to whom a deferential attitude is due. They argue that for Japanese speakers, in whose culture ‘politeness’ and ‘friendliness’ are quite discreet, learning to operate within the American system involves re-learning the concepts ‘polite’ and ‘friendly’.1 Similarly, Iranians usually need to familiarise themselves with the idea that in English the use of first names with people one is not intimate with implies informality but not intimacy, as the use of FN in Persian often does. In other words, in the mind of Iranians informality/friendliness and intimacy largely overlap, so Mrs Nazarian must have considered me impertinent to use “Sindy” which, to her mind, signified a long acquaintance, friendship and age equality none of which were present in our relationship.
We all have a sense of what a term of address does in a relationship. This sense is usually rooted in the conventions and the worldview of our native culture, and comes into relief in interaction with people operating under different conventions and worldviews. This point is another variation on the theme of the emic/etic gaze discussed in the previous newsletter, and once again highlights the different, often divergent, ways we all look at the world.
If you find this discussion stimulating I would love to hear your comments and anecdotes!
Crossed my path
(Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash)
Online essay
What’s in a name? Plenty: Fellow London Writer Salonista Suchandrika Chakrabarti ponders on the importance of getting names right : https://zora.medium.com/whats-in-a-name-plenty-4fc7a3bdc61a
Postcard (home)
My dear Akram
Over the five years that we worked together in the university in Tehran, we forged a very close friendship and spent hours and hours chatting in Persian and English, sharing stories that we had not shared with anyone else. Even so, you always called me Khanum (‘Ms’) Doctor and I called you Khanum M. After I left Iran and most of our communication was written in English, you suggested that we switch to first names: I would become Sofia and you would be Akram.
The same happened with another two Iranians: a colleague of mine, and an old student who is now studying in the US. I still don’t know what prompted them to suggest these switches. I am always too careful, even cautious not to offend, so I have never asked why. I can only speculate: we have all left the academic setting where (perceived) rank difference must be reflected in the address terms; we have switched to communicating in written English; the time distance has made us realise the affinity we had when we were together.
I wonder whether we will switch back to the formal address terms when we meet again and speak in Persian; my hypothesis is that we will. But I also assume that our usage will not reflect any change in our feelings of close friendship. Until then, keep well and keep in touch.
Sofia
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I’d love to hear your comments:
If you need any references to the academic papers I based this work on, do email me sakoutlaki@gmail.com
Dear Sofia / αξαέρφη ..
What a nice analysis you have made on a subject that I had also tried to understand and adjust according to the different countries that I leaved in my life! Apart for the age and friendliness factors a very important parameter which has to be considered is the rank (or the position of the person has within the organisation that you are working) or the business relation that you have (as in a customer - client situation). The safest way which I usually follow is to address all the people which I am not very familiar with the typical title + Surname and then, if along the way they propose to switch to first name I usually follow. Of course there were cases where I preferred to keep the formal way of addressing someone and the purpose was simply because I wanted to maintain a distance...
It is important to differentiate the reasons why we might be using different ways to address people we know or we meet for first time as it defines in a way the level of intimacy that we wish (or not) to have and / or the social / professional distance that we need to maintain.
Dear Sofia,
Thanks for this interesting post that explains very clearly another principle of the pragmatics and the verbal interactions.
Specially, I love it when you share your observations of interactions between Persian speakers and how you explain differences inside the community.
I would juste like to add the difference between "jan" and "joon". "Jan" puts some distance and "joon" is used in more intimate and close contexts.
Also, I would like to share my own experience of Iranian when I first came in France.
As a PhD student, I didn't had very much interaction with other students but I used to work a lot in the university libraries. I was very surprised to notice that younger students searching for a free place or information, began to adresse me with a "tu" ("Tu t'en vas ?", "Excuse-moi tu sais où est la cafette ?", "Excuse-moi, tu peux surveiller mes affaires ? "). In all the cases, we didn't know each other. Then I realized that in France, specially in the university context (specially in the left ones), it's a sign of solidarity to use tu.
Voilà :)
Looking forward to read more of your posts.
Keep safe,