Culpeper, O’Driscoll and Hardaker’s chapter probes into British people’s understandings of politeness and contrasts them with the understandings of people in North America. Such overarching generalisations, the authors argue, are commonly found in lay persons’ assessments of politeness and thus constitute fertile ground for studies of metapragmatic politeness. Furthermore, the results of a survey of studies focusing on either British culture or North American culture as reified entities indicated a scarcity of emic studies of these cultures in the field of politeness. The authors’ study aims to fill this gap. To that end, they apply corpus linguistic tools to the Oxford English Corpus and subject to scrutiny the lexeme ‘polite’ and the associated clusters of collocates. The results are then triangulated with geolocated Twitter data. Findings partly support both the British and the North American politeness stereotypes, but also show that, contrary to expectations, friendliness and involvement are an important feature of understandings of politeness in both the UK and the USA.

Locher and Luginbühl’s chapter takes a discursive approach to politeness, analyzing how im/polite behavior of Germans and Swiss is discussed in recent online commentaries on national differences. The study draws on newspaper coverage claiming that most Swiss people do not like German immigrants because of, among other reasons, what they consider their impolite behavior. The data (written in standard German) focus on a discussion of what the German-speaking population considers as politeness in a Swiss context and how this differs from politeness norms in Germany. A content analysis of the comments is followed by a linguistic analysis of selected codes. The results show a number of interesting clashes of language ideologies as societal/cultural politeness ideologies interlace with general language ideologies; language and culture were often equated. This entails that Swiss German dialects and German standard German are constructed as being two separate languages.Furthermore, not only is ‘Swiss German’ depicted as a homogeneous entity and as a different language than German; the behavior that comes with it, a Swiss politeness, is also construed as a unified construct.