International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2025

Saudade is a Lusophone concept concerning psychological reactions to situations related to the deprivation of loved ones and/or familiar places. It can be assessed empirically using the Experience of Saudade Scale (ESS), which comprises three factors: Lack of loved ones, Lack of intimacy, and Longing for the past. The aim of the study was to obtain further evidence concerning the psychometric properties of this scale and its relationship with psychological well-being and COVID-19-related concepts. Two hundred and nineteen participants, aged 18 to 80, completed the ESS and eight other scales measuring life satisfaction, life purpose, optimism, altruism, coronavirus anxiety, fear of COVID-19, empathy, and experiences related to COVID-19. The fit of the three-factor ESS model to the data was good, and reliability was adequate. All scores related to psychological well-being and COVID-19 concepts correlated with experienced saudade in the expected direction. The COVID-19 scores were able to be related to saudade factors over and above well-being measures.

Can Russian grammatical gender influence an artist’s decisions in personification or conceptualization of abstract entities? This article aims to contribute to the scholarly literature on linguistic relativity, and re-examines the relationship between grammatical gender and patterns in thought and culture in the specific domain of art. The results presented in this paper support the notion that culture might have a tremendous effect that could entirely override any possible effect of language. Specifically, they show immediate androcentric bias — i.e., a strong effect for a male depiction (= a strong correspondence between personification in visual art and grammatical gender in Russian), but not for a female depiction.

Pride is an emotion that has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in recent decades. Historically, it has been rarely explored in non-European languages. This study examines the verbal displays of pride in Singaporean Chinese–English bilingual youths who are highly fluent in both languages. Twenty-four bilinguals (12 with Mandarin Chinese as home language and 12 with English as home language) were interviewed in both languages in two separate sessions lasting 30 minutes each and held one month apart. In each session, the participants were presented with nine different scenarios comprising seven individual and group achievement-based scenarios, including two filler scenarios. They were asked how they felt about each of the scenarios. Three main trends were found in this study. Across the seven achievement-based scenarios, pride expressions were evaluated and regulated differently. The participants were more likely to express pride and view it more positively for a group-based achievement than when it was a personal achievement. Additionally, there was a significant home language effect with both English and Chinese home language speakers more likely to express pride in their home language and to feel them more strongly. However, Chinese home language bilinguals were less likely to express pride as compared to English home language bilinguals when interviewed in English. These findings highlight that Singaporean bilinguals generally showed more collectivistic construal of pride, but home language experience had a pronounced effect, hence distinguishing the bilingual groups from each other. This study points to the importance of examining the linguistic history and repertoire of bilinguals even though they are from within the same cultural and language group.

This study analyses how and why gender movements in Africa celebrate women and their achievements. The study is rooted in the speech act theory focusing on praise and praise singing in recognition of women achievers in politics and society. Praise in this context functions as a pragmatic-discourse and political campaign strategy for achieving gender equality and political participation. By analysing campaign discourses via methods rooted in linguistics, this study argues that constant remembrance and recognition of the achievements of prominent women of history as well as the contribution of contemporary women leaders around the world, present these women as role models and symbols of inspiration for the younger generation of aspiring leaders.