Keywords
Tunisian Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic
humour
embarrassment
How to Cite
Abstract
Laughter has been extensively studied by Darwin (1890). Van Hooff (1972; 1989) traced the phylogeny of smiling and laughter to non-human primate “grin-face” and “play face”, which signals non-serious attacks. Human cognition evolved beyond primate “play”, with human laughter expanding to a wider range of social contexts (Gervais and Wilson 2005). Henceforth, smiling/laughter has been considered an expression of joy at varying intensities. The universality of this expression was studied by Ekman et al. (1982; 1990), identifying two universal kinds of smiles/laughs: felt (Duchenne) and fake (non-Duchenne)—the latter appearing in uncomfortable situations. Ekman and Friesen’s (1976, 1978) Facial Action Coding System distinguishes 44 action units, with AU6 and AU12 being the Duchenne smile marker (Martin et al., 2017), while AU12 alone signals a non-Duchenne smile (Ekman, 1990). Preliminary observations noting signs of discomfort such as non-Duchenne smiles, and gaze aversion (Tangney 1999), showed Tunisians exhibiting such signs when speaking in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). In diglossic Tunisia, Low (Tunisian Arabic) and High (MSA) varieties coexist (Ferguson 1959), whereby code-switching may be appraised as incongruous, a source of humour for observers (Ferguson, 1959). This may elicit hearer amusement (even laughter) and speaker embarrassment for violating sociolinguistic norms (Goffman, 1956). This paper hypothesises that switching to MSA, results in embarrassment, manifesting through non-Duchenne smiles (AU12 only; Ekman, 1990), an expression associated with social discomfort, along with other embarrassment signs. This social emotion may relate to a broader negotiation of an ethno-cultural pan-Arab identity, prompting a re-evaluation of MSA pedagogy.
References
Badawi, E. M. (1973). Mustawayāt al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāṣirah fī Miṣr: baḥth fī ʻalāqat al-lughah bi-al-ḥaḍārah. [Levels of contemporary Arabic in Egypt: A study of the relationship between language and civilization]. Dār al-Maʻārif.
Blau, J. (1977). The beginnings of the Arabic diglossia: A study of the origins of Neoarabic. Undena Publications, 4(4), 175–202.
Colombotos, J., Elinson, J., & Loewenstein, R. (1969). Effect of interviewers’ sex on interview responses. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 47(1), 227–231. https://doi.org/10.2307/3349194
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. G.P. Putnam.
Darwin, C. (2009). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Cambridge University Press.[Originally published in 1890] https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511694110
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (2017). Human ethology. Routledge.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1982). Felt, false, and miserable smiles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 6(4), 238–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00987191
Ekman, P., Davidson, R. J., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology: II. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 342. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.58.2.342
Ekman, P., Sorenson, E. R., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotion. Science, 164(3875), 86–88. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.164.3875.86
Fasold, R. (1984). The sociolinguistics of society. Basil Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100010896
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15(2), 325–340. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1959.11659702
Fishman, J. A. (1965). Who speaks what language to whom and when? La Linguistique, 1(Fasc. 2), 67–88.
Gervais, M., & Wilson, D. S. (2005). The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 80(4), 395–430. https://doi.org/10.1086/498281
Girard, J. M., Shandar, G., Liu, Z., Cohn, J. F., Yin, L., & Morency, L. P. (2019). Reconsidering the Duchenne smile: Indicator of positive emotion or artifact of smile intensity?. International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and workshops: [proceedings]. ACII (Conference), 2019, 594–599. https://doi.org/10.1109/acii.2019.8925535
Glenn, P. (2003). Laughter in interaction (Vol. 18). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519888
Goffman, E. (1956). Embarrassment and social organization. American Journal of Sociology, 62 (3), 264–271. https://doi.org/10.1086/222003
Guiora, A. Z. (1994). The two faces of language ego. Psychologica Belgica, 34(2–3), 83–97. https://doi.org/10.5334/pb.862
Guiora, A. Z., Paluszny, M., Beit‐Hallahmi, B., Catford, J. C., Cooley, R. E., & Dull, C. Y. (1975). Language and person: Studies in language behaviour. Language Learning, 25(1), 43–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1975.tb00108.x
Hitokoto, H. & Ishii, K. (2022). Comparative and contrastive emotion studies. In G. Schiewer, J. Altarriba & B. Ng (Eds.), Language and emotion: An international handbook volume 2 (pp. 1191-1216). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110670851-025
Hornik, J. (1982). Impact of pre-call request form and gender interaction on response to a mail survey. Journal of Marketing Research, 19(1), 144–151. https://doi.org/10.2307/3151539
Khamis-Dakwar, R., & Froud, K. (2007). Lexical processing in two language varieties: An event-related brain potential study of Arabic native speakers. In M.A. Mughazy (Ed.), Perspectives on Arabic linguistics: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Vol. 20 (pp.153–168). John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cilt.290.13kha
Keltner, D., & Buswell, B. N. (1997). Embarrassment: its distinct form and appeasement functions. Psychological Bulletin, 122(3), 250-270. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.122.3.250
Krumhuber, E. G., & Manstead, A. S. (2009). Can Duchenne smiles be feigned? New evidence on felt and false smiles. Emotion, 9(6), 807– 820. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017844
Martin, J., Rychlowska, M., Wood, A., & Niedenthal, P. (2017). Smiles as multipurpose social signals. Trends in cognitive sciences, 21(11), 864–877. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.08.007
Martin, R. A. (2006). The psychology of humour: An integrative approach. Elsevier Academic Press.
Mazzocconi, C., Tian, Y., & Ginzburg, J. (2020). What’s your laughter doing there? A taxonomy of the pragmatic functions of laughter. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 13(3), 1302–1321. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2020.2994533
Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge University Press.
Provine, R. R. (2000). Laughter: A scientific investigation. Faber and Faber.
Provine, R. R. (2012). Curious behaviour: Yawning, laughing, hiccupping, and beyond. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2jbrt8
Provine, R. R. (2016). Laughter as a scientific problem: An adventure in sidewalk neuroscience. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 524(8), 1532–1539. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.23845
Sayahi, L. (2014). Diglossia and language contact: Language variation and change in North Africa. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139035576
Suleiman, Y. (2013). Arabic folk linguistics: Between mother tongue and native language. In J. Owens (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of Arabic linguistics (pp. 264-280). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199764136.013.0011
Tangney, J. P. (1999). The self-conscious emotions: Shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride. In T. Dalgleish & M. J. Power (Eds.), Handbook of emotion and cognition (pp. 541–568). John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/0470013494.ch26
Thibault, P., Levesque, M., Gosselin, P., & Hess, U. (2012). The Duchenne marker is not a universal signal of smile authenticity—But it can be learned! Social Psychology, 43(4), 215–221. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000122
Van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M. (1972). A comparative approach to the phylogeny of laughter and smiling. In R. A. Hinde (Ed.), Nonverbal communication, (pp. 209–241). Cambridge University Press.
Van Hooff, J. (1989). Laughter and humour, and the 'duo-in-uno' of nature and culture. In W. Koch (Ed.), Nature of culture: Proceedings of the international and interdisciplinary symposium October 7-11, 1986 in Bochum, (pp. 120-149). Bochum Publications.
Versteegh, K. (1997). The Arabic language. Columbia University Press.
Webster, C. (1996). Hispanic and Anglo interviewer and respondent ethnicity and gender: The impact on survey response quality. Journal of Marketing Research, 33(1), 62–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/3152013
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2026 The European Journal of Humour Research