Prophet Muhammad's Linguistic Etiquette

Abstract

The present study tackles the concept of linguistic etiquette in Prophet Muhammad's Hadith adopting a sociolinguistic perspective that examines the relationship between linguistic etiquette and politeness. The study adopts Leech’s (1983) model of politeness to investigate maxims of politeness and politeness scales in Prophet Muhammad's spoken discourse. Data consisted of Hadith on morals and linguistic etiquette reported in reliable Hadith books such as Al-Bukhari, Muslim and Abu Dawood. Analyzed Hadith displayed a clear observation of maxims of tact, generosity, approbation, modesty and sympathy. Further examples from Hadith manifested observance of cost–benefit, optionality, indirectness, authority and social distance scales. Keywords: Hadith, Linguistic Etiquette, Politeness, Politeness Maxims, Politeness Scales, Prophet Mohammad.