Abstract
People employ applauses, which are sometimes considered as formulaic expressions, or blessings, a term that has replaced “applauses” today, to express their feelings and thoughts. These formulaic expressions are used in some daily social and cultural activities such as greetings, shopping, visiting of patients, visiting of birth celebrations, rituals, welcoming the guests, seeing someone to the door, thanking and so on. Since the blessings are formulaic expressions transferred from one generation to other, they are considered to be the transmitters of a culture. Blessings, hence, provide information on culture, rituals, beliefs and behavioral patterns of a society. Since blessings involve information related to culture and have a crucial impact on transmitting culture, there exist numerous studies on applauses and blessings in Turkish both in Turkey and Turkish speaking countries. In the scope of the present research study, it is aimed to have information about the daily life and culture of Arabic speaking people from past to the present. That study emerged as a result of the data gathered from an ethnographic study conducted in Antakya, Harbiye and Samandağ districts of Hatay province in 2017. The people interviewed during the ethnographic field study are Arabic and Turkish speaking bilinguals. Within the study, 24 people were interviewed in the abovementioned districts. Data gathered from the field studies were classified into different categories depending on their meanings. While writing the translation of the Arabic blessings in Turkish, first sentence is generally the literal meaning and the second is the Turkish equivalent. In this study, phoneme-based transcription system, which is widely used in the field of Arabic dialectology was utilized. The study was mainly dealt with from the perspectives of Linguistic Anthropology and Sociolinguistics.