Softboiled Speech: A Contrastive Analysis of Death Euphemisms in Egyptian Arabic and Chinese

Abstract

This contrastive study is geared towards investigating the euphemistic language of death in Egyptian Arabic and Chinese. The results indicate that euphemisms are universal since they exist in every language and no human communication is without euphemisms. Both Egyptian and Chinese native speakers regard the topic of death as a taboo. Therefore, they handle it with care. Egyptian Arabic and Chinese employ euphemistic expressions to avoid mentioning the topic of death. However, Chinese has a large number of death euphemisms as compared with the Egyptian Arabic ones. The results also show that death euphemisms are structurally and basically employed in both Egyptian Arabic and Chinese in metonymy as a linguistic device and a figure of speech. Moreover, they employ conceptual metaphor to substitute the taboo topic of death.

A Study of Conflict Issues Affecting Ugandan Housemaids who Migrate to Saudi Arabia and How to Mitigate them

March 10, 2026

This study aims to comprehensively analyse the complex interplay between