Revisiting face and identity: Insights from Tunisian culture

- Investigates face and identity from a social-psychological perspective.
- Shows that Tunisian face and identity are interrelated.
- Tunisian face is sensitive to culture-specific values.
- Culturally defined self-esteem seems to be the common core between Tunisian face and identity.

This paper investigates how face is conceptualized in Tunisian Arabic (TA) with reference to the notion of identity. The study is based on a corpus of 139 expressions collected by the researcher using her knowledge of TA as a native speaker of the language as well as through observation of authentic conversations. The expressions included terms using the literal meaning of face as 'the front part of the head', figurative and idiomatic expressions, collocations, and proverbs. The paper shows that face in the Tunisian culture is closely related to identity and that in addition to situation-specific factors, adherence to prevailing cultural values plays a crucial role in determining face salience. The study has implications for face research at the emic and etic levels.