International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2015

Offensive language use in Singapore’s languacultures appears to be underpinned by cultural norms and values embraced by most if not all Singaporeans. Interviews with local informants and perusal of Singapore’s linguistic and cultural resources led to the identification of eight offensive words and phrases deemed representative of Singaporean coarseness. This set was narrowed down to a smaller set of common words and phrases, all Chinese Hokkien, all culturally laden. The finding that, although originally Hokkien, all of them are accessible not only to the Chinese-speaking population but also to speakers of Singapore Malay, Singapore Tamil, and Singapore English is compelling. The words and phrases studied in this paper are full-fledged members of the lexicon of these local non-Chinese languages, without loss or distortion of meaning. They are accepted as part of the local linguistic scene and of local cultural knowledge. At least in certain situations, people of different ethnic backgrounds who live and work together can rely on them as a testament of common identity which, in a curious way, gives voice to the sociocultural homogeneity this society unrelentingly pursues.

In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct mind in Trinidadian creole. We analyze the lexical semantics of the word and explore the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. Our analysis demonstrates that the Anglo concept is a cognitively oriented construct with a semantic configuration based on ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’, whereas the Trinidadian mind is a moral concept configured around perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We further explore the Trinidadian moral discourse of bad mind and good mind, and articulate a set of cultural scripts for the cultural values linked with personhood in the Trinidadian context. Taking a postcolonial approach to the semantics of personhood, we critically engage with Anglo-international discourses of the mind, exposing the conceptual stranglehold of the colonial language (i.e., English) and its distorting semantic grip on global discourse. We argue that creole categories of values and personhood — such as the Trinidadian concept of mind — provide a new venue for critical mind studies as well as for new studies in creole semantics and cultural diversity.

It is now commonly accepted that, for the sake of international peace, the provisions of the UN Charter (originally devised to regulate interstate wars) should be interpreted so as to allow for intrastate interference as well. Yet the UN Charter does not explicitly state what the term peace refers to. It seems that the concept underpinning this term is so much the norm that only deviations from it are marked and therefore noteworthy or definable. Still, in view of the wide array of UN peacekeeping missions all over the world, a clear notion of ‘peace’ could make an important contribution to the success of these missions. In view of this, the paper addresses two questions: what lies behind the concept of ‘peace’ embedded in UN discourse, and how internationally salient is it? To provide the necessary perspective, we undertake a comparative analysis of the UN and Giryama (Kenya) ‘peace’ concepts. The analysis aims to highlight those aspects of Giryama and UN ‘peace’ that are characteristically ‘socially meaningful’ and concludes by highlighting convergences and divergences between them.

Most EFL curricula, irrespective of the variety of English they seek to impart, have little time for cultural values, focusing instead on “Culture with a capital C,” i.e., history, geography, cultural heritage, folklore, etc. Applied ethnolinguistics is a relatively new framework that has been developed to curb the trend. It consists of a number of pathways that can be replicated by advanced language students eager to increase their awareness of potentially unfamiliar cultural values. One of the pathways, ethnorhetorics (the study of culturally salient figures of speech), will be illustrated here with data drawn from Australian English. The focus will be on the tall poppy metaphor. A few hints at its cultural salience and a brief look at where tall poppies are typically found will be followed by a more linguistically oriented analysis. On the basis of the evidence gathered, we will formulate a hypothesis about cultural values which (at least from the students’ point of view) is in need of further corroboration. This requires a different pathway, known as ethnoaxiology, which will not be illustrated in this paper; a few pointers will be provided instead.

The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English please, German bitte, or similar constructs in other European languages. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot ‘say please’, and Danish children cannot ‘say the magic word’. However, lige is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic that has almost been left unstudied because it does not correlate well with any of the major Anglo-international research questions such as “how to express politeness” or “how to make a request.” This paper analyzes the semantics of lige in order to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated not only that Danish lige does a different semantic job than English please, but also that please-based and lige-based interactions are bound to different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations, and reflect differing cultural values.

This study aims to illustrate the intricate connections that exist between features of a certain language and underlying culture-specific conceptualizations. The analysis sheds new light on a German cultural core value, namely, Ordnung “order,” its relationship to other cultural themes, and the influence it exerts on German interpersonal style. To reach a better understanding of the German core value Ordnung “order” as it relates to other German cultural themes, we first provide an analysis of the common expressions alles (ist) in Ordnung “everything [is] in order” and Ordnung muss sein “there has to be order.” This will be followed by an analysis of the social descriptor term locker “loose.” We seek to illustrate the merits of a perspective in language and culture studies that is truly culture-internal and can thus facilitate cross-cultural understanding, and we do so by applying the principles of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to semantic and ethnopragmatic description.