In a recent encounter with a Polish speaker in which I tested the products of my Polish studies, I found that the woman with which I was speaking was extremely offended by my speech. It was not a disrespect of her language that provoked such feelings as she later commented that my accent and vocabulary in the language was impressive for a beginner, but rather that the way in which I structured my grammar was insulting to her as an individual. She claimed that this was a result of my "impoliteness" in not referring to her in the third person, apologizing or thanking her at the beginning of my sentences and my lack of reference to her as Miss. As I thought that I had approached her in an extremely friendly and polite manner as she had acquiesced to aiding me in my studies this revelation left me utterly confused. In my further research of the topic, I discovered a study by Professor Eva Ongiermann in which she analyzes the use of polite speech and the importance of polite grammatical constructs in Polish as well as other european languages. She concludes that the amount of necessary polite discourse in order to not offend the addressed party is 6 % of communication in English and approximately 20% in Polish and other Slavonic languages.
As none of her statistical data was directly presented in the study, I assume that this translates into some form of English requiring one to say "Please open that door" in order to achieve the threshold of politeness while in Poland the necessary phrase would be something to the effect of "Would you mind please opening that door sir?" In addition, it would appear that this cultural construct has produced a type of barrier between native Polish speakers and those who are more ignorant of its grammatical constructs such as myself as the Polish understanding of politeness relies almost entirely upon speech rather than body language. The 20% of necessary polite communication is therefore broken down into approximately 19% polite speech and 1% polite action while the 6% of necessary polite communication in English is essentially reversed, with 5% polite action and 1% polite speech. That is to say that a native polish speaker who praises his audience to no end but does so with a grimace on his face would most likely be accepted as polite in Poland and offensive in America while the native English speaker who warmly smiles at every Polish individual he encounters but expresses himself with clumsy speech will be rejected outright.
I find this cultural construct of politeness requirements in the United States and other english speaking nations to be understandable since the language of english is taught around the globe and as such has been adapted into "Indian English" and "Chinese English" whose grammatical constructs are similar but are not always identical. The average American encounters many different forms of broken english and strange accents on a daily basis and expecting conformity to a universal representation of politeness in speech in such an environment is absurd. Thus the American understanding that a smile, a handshake, and eye contact indicate politeness is reasonable. However, it appears strange to me that even though Poles do not encounter the same level of diversity on a daily basis that they would still emphasize the importance of politeness in speech over that of action and that they would place politeness in such high esteem that those who do not abide by its rules, such as myself and other tourists, are oftentimes completely ignored. No doubt an explanation exists within the cultural history of Poland and its language development, however, I can not seem to find a reasonable source concerning this in my research.
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