Cultural outsiders' reported adherence to Finnish and French politeness norms Johanna Isos € avi * University of Helsinki article info Article history: Received 17 January 2019 Received in revised form 4 October 2019 Accepted 6 October 2019 Keywords: Intercultural (im)politeness Culture Frames of expectations Face abstract Given the contested notion of culture, intercultural (im)politeness represents an under- studied area of research. Yet, (im)politeness research should examine broader social forces. Drawing upon data from five focus group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis, my study relies on the discursive approach and relational work (Locher and Watts, 2005). My study shows that cultural outsiders reported adhering differently to cultural politeness norms as resources. As such, a reported low tolerance for pragmatic variation in the Finnish and French cultures appears to carry two consequences. First, Finnish and French participants reported changing their adherence to cultural politeness norms in order to follow behavior that better corresponds to the expectations framed by the target culture, and to avoid negatively marked behavior judged as impolite/inappro- priate. Second, participants who reported adhering less to the politeness norms of their culture of origin found a better match between their behavior and the dominant politeness norms in the target culture, which carried positive consequences related to constructing their identity. Finally, the close link between relational work and identity construction demonstrated that although participants reported adhering to the politeness norms of the target culture, they emphasized teaching their children the politeness norms of their culture of origin. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Despite the frequency of intercultural contacts in a globalized world, surprisingly few studies exist on the area of inter- cultural (im)politeness (e.g., Mugford, 2018), examining encounters between members of different cultures. Following the emergence of politeness research, most studies were cross-cultural in nature: politeness was examined in intracultural settings, and later compared across cultures (Haugh and K ad ar, 2017 , p. 601). Subsequently, with the discursive turn of the 2000s, many scholars have remained somewhat reluctant to examine cultural (im)politeness, instead, limiting themselves to smaller communities of practice (Sifianou and Blitvich, 2017 , p. 578e579). While culture remains a contested concept, an increasing number of scholars argue that (im)politeness research should look at “broader social forces” (Mills, 2011 , pp. 76e77; Sifianou and Blitvich, 2017 , p. 589). My study aims to respond to the need to increase our understanding of intercultural (im)politeness by examining two under-researched languages and cultures (cf. Sifianou and Blitvich, 2017 , p. 580): Finnish and French. I focus on cultural * Corresponding author. Department of Languages, French, P.O. Box 24, 00014, University of Helsinki, Finland E-mail address: johanna.isosavi@helsinki.fi. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.10.015 0378-2166/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Journal of Pragmatics 155 (2020) 177e192