As a universal phenomenon,politeness plays a crucial role in helping to maintain social harmony and friendly interpersonal relationships.This paper aims to make a contrastive study of courtesy language between the English and Chinese cultures.Without understanding their differences,it is difficult to achieve a successful cross-cultural communication and may even cause serious misunderstandings.In this paper we introduce the definition of politeness in Chinese and English,and it makes a contrastive analysis concerning the similarities and differences in politeness between the two cultures from different perspectives. As a universal phenomenon, politeness plays a crucial role in helping to maintain social harmony and friendly interpersonal relationships.This paper aims to make a contrastive study of courtesy language between the English and Chinese cultures.Without understanding their differences, it is difficult to achieve a successful cross-cultural communication and may even cause serious misunderstandings. In this paper we introduce the definition of politeness in Chinese and English, and it makes a contrastive analysis concerning the similarities and differences in politeness between the two cultures from different perspectives.