Summary
The identity of the person who is responsible for a — spoken or written — text can surface in many ways in the linguistic properties of this text, for example voice quality, deictic expressions, choice of special words or constructions, or explicit identification by name and address. Sometimes, this is not desirable, for example in letters whose content concerns, in one way or the other, a delicate issue. In this case, name and address may be — fully or partly — withheld. The way in which this is done is culture-specific and language-specific. This paper examines 39 letters that were sent to the religious editor of two English-language newspapers in Saudi Arabia; in most of these letters, the authors ask for advice on religious or legal matters. The editor decides in which way — if at all — the identy of the writer should be revealed, when the letter is published — fully, in abbreviated (and practically anonymous) form, or not at all. It is shown that his anonymisation strategies are not so very much dictated by the content of the letter, as one might suppose, but by its linguistic properties, such as its structural complexity, the use of certain pronouns, and a number of other devices.