In the last twenty years, studies on cross-cultural pragmatics in general and apology strategiesin specific have focused on western and East-Asian pragmatics. A small volume of researchhas been conducted in investigating speech acts production by Arabic dialect speakers.Therefore, this study investigated apology strategies used by Libyan Arabic speakers using anonline Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire. The DCT consisted of six situationscovering different social contexts. The survey was written in Libyan Arabic dialect to helpgenerate vernacular speech as much as possible. The participants were 25 Libyan nationals,12 females, and 13 males. Also, to get a deeper understanding of the motivation behind theuse of certain strategies, the researcher interviewed four participants using Libyan Arabicdialect as well. The results revealed a high use of IFID, offer of repair, and explanation.Although this might support the universality of apology strategies, it was clear that culturalnorms and religion determined the choice of apology strategies significantly. This led to thediscovery of new culture specific strategies such as:
Reassuring the offended party, Determinism, Invoking God’s name , and Calming the hearer. This might suggest thatim/politeness should be evaluated in interaction (Eelen, 2001) and as a form of a social practice (Kadar and Haugh, 2013, p.94). This research gives an insight into (im)politenessstrategies in the Libyan society and it is hoped to contribute to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics.