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Accepted Paper:
Touching elbows and Wuhan shakes: changes in greeting behavior
Susanne Nylund Skog
(Institute for Language and Folklore)
Greeting behavior express and create identity, signal personal attitude and group belonging. This paper investigates changes in greeting behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on hugging and cheek kissing. The empirical base consists of answers to web-based questionnaires during 2016-2022.
Paper long abstract:
The theoretical starting point for this paper is that greeting behavior is constituted of socially recognizable actions, manifesting the culture that produces that behavior. How we greet each other is from such a perspective a linguistic and cultural everyday practice that reveals how we perceive ourselves and others. Greeting behavior express and create identity, and signal personal attitude as well as group belonging.
With theoretical inspiration from the fields of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, this paper investigates changes in greeting behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on hugging and cheek kissing. The empirical base consists of answers to web-based questionnaires on greeting behavior during 2016-2022.
In this paper, I will show that the way we greet and say goodbye to each other is processes involving a lot of thought, consideration, concern and reflection. This is especially clear when it comes to hugs and cheek kisses, and in relation to changes in everyday life during the Covid-19 pandemic. These changes highlight that it is culturally demanded that we greet each other in some way, and consequently the restrictions during the pandemic has prompted new and creative ways of greeting behaviors including touching elbows and the so-called Wuhan shake.