Speech Etiquette of Fairy-Tale Heroes: The Transformation of Address Forms and Politeness Strategies in AI-Generated Retellings of English and Uzbek Tales

In fairy tales, how a hero speaks is often as important as what the hero does. In Uzbek tales, the clever Kal greets a terrifying Dev with a respectful “Assalomu alaykum, Dev bobo”, and the Dev replies that, had the boy not greeted him, he would have swallowed him whole. In English tales, Molly Whuppie and Jack bargain, flatter and trick their way past giants with words. Address forms, greetings, blessings and politeness strategies are therefore not decoration; they encode a culture’s model of respect, hierarchy and kinship, and they often drive the plot itself. As large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini increasingly retell and translate fairy tales, it is important to ask what happens to this layer of meaning.