Abstract
This study examined the impact of requestee's gender on the choice of request strategies by female speakers of Saudi Colloquial Arabic. A Discourse Completion Test consisting of twelve situations was used to collect data from two groups of participants. The first group consisted of 40 Saudi females directing their requests to female requestees. The second group consisted of 40 Saudi females directing their requests to male requestees. The collected data from the two groups were compared and analyzed using Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper's (1989) coding scheme of request head act strategies. Findings suggest that Saudi females varied their request strategies based on the gender of requestee. While they tended to use more direct request strategies with females, they tended to use more indirect request strategies with males. A remarkable finding revealed by this study relates to situations in which the rate of imposition is high. While Saudi females tended to use more indirect request strategies with females in these situations, most of them refused to make a request to males regardless of the power and social distance between interlocuters. This study's findings, however, have to be understood in terms of the specific nature of the cultural norms of Saudi society. Since Saudi Arabia is a gender-segregated society, it is expected that females would keep distance from males who are not first -degree relatives. This would normally entail the use of higher level of indirectness and avoidance of requesting weighty personal favors. (c) 2022 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).