Normativity and Variation in the Address Terms System Practiced among the Jordanian Youth Community
This study investigates the key forms of address used amongst Jordanian university
students, the impact of gender on using these forms and what accounts for the variation in their
address system. By addressing the issue of normativity and heterogeneity in the use of address
terms, in different social settings, the study enriches the understanding of the internal variation of
the address term system. Data collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were
analysed, based on Watts? discursive approach to politeness and Agha?s approach of indexicality.
The results revealed that the identified normative patterns represent Jordanian university politic
behaviours, which index different social meanings and relations among the youth community, in
relation to specific social contexts. The most frequent strategies university students use for addressing
others are personal names, innovative terms, descriptive phrases, pronouns, titles, teknonyms, and
religious, military, attention attractors, as well as a combination of these terms. It also seems that
there are no absolute stable patterns of address term usage among the youth community, speaking
Jordanian Arabic. Rather, there is an infinite society-internal heterogeneity in the address terms usage.
The results also revealed that an intra-group variation signifies social struggles over the norms of
address term usage and potentially normative incertitude