Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes

World Englishes, 2015 doi: 10.1111/weng.12156

0883-2919

Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes FARZAD SHARIFIAN∗

ABSTRACT: Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary field of research that explores how features of human languages and language varieties are entrenched in cultural conceptualisations such as cultural schemas (models), cultural categories, and cultural-conceptual metaphors. This paper presents an overview of the emerging field of Cultural Linguistics and argues, by presenting examples from several varieties of English, that world Englishes need to be examined from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics in order for us to gain a better understanding of how English is used by communities of speakers around the world to express their cultural conceptualisations, including their world views.

INTRODUCTION

Cultural Linguistics is an interdisciplinary sub-branch of linguistics that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations (Palmer 1996; Sharifian 2011, 2015). It explores how features of human languages and language varieties are entrenched in cultural conceptualisations such as cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural-conceptual metaphors. Using examples from a number of varieties of English, I will show how studies of world Englishes may benefit from adopting the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, which reveals how English is used by communities of speakers around the world to express their culturally constructed conceptualisations and world views. Cultural Linguistics also provides a solid basis for identifying varieties of English, basing this on the examination of the underlying level of cultural conceptualisations. I will also argue that Cultural Linguistics significantly benefits from studies of world Englishes, in that varieties of English provide rich data regarding how one and the same language may be associated with different systems of cultural conceptualisations. The paper begins by presenting an overview of the emerging field of Cultural Linguistics, and then reviews research that has hitherto been conducted on varieties of English from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics. This will be followed by a discussion of how Cultural Linguistics can provide a general principle for identifying a variety of English and in compiling dictionaries of world Englishes. The final part of the paper examines the disadvantage and discrimination experienced by speakers of Australian Aboriginal English in educational contexts from a Cultural Linguistics perspective. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS

The term ‘cultural linguistics’ may be used to refer to the general area of research on the relationship between language and culture, which dates back at least to the eighteenth ∗ Monash University, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, Building 11, Melbourne, Victoria, 3800, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] C 2015

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century and the work of influential scholars such as Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835), and later Franz Boas (1858–1942), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), and Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941). However, I use the term ‘Cultural Linguistics’ to refer to a rather recent multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language and conceptualisations that are culturally constructed and that are instantiated through features of languages and language varieties. Cultural Linguistics grew out of an interest in the general principle subscribed to by cognitive linguistics that meaning emerges from the interaction between human perceptual and conceptual faculties. While cognitive linguistics has often adopted a universalistic tone, Cultural Linguistics emphasises the role of culture in conceptualising human experiences of various kinds and the interrelationship between language, culture, and conceptualisation. Gary B. Palmer, a linguistic anthropologist formerly from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, proposed a synergy between cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology in Toward a theory of Cultural Linguistics (1996). In this book, Palmer argued that Cognitive linguistics can be directly applied to the study of language and culture, an area that had traditionally fallen within the scope of linguistic anthropology and anthropological linguistics. He called for close links between three traditions in anthropological linguistics and cognitive linguistics, as follows: Cognitive linguistics can be tied in to three traditional approaches that are central to anthropological linguistics: Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics (ethno science), and the ethnography of speaking. To the synthesis that results I have given the name Cultural Linguistics (Palmer 1996: 5; emphasis in original).

Broadly speaking, the three traditions within anthropological linguistics referred to the view that language needs to be studied within its socio-cultural context. As for the exact nature of the relationship between language and culture, scholarly views span a wide range, from those who argue that language and culture shape human thought to those who simply view language as a cultural activity (see Underhill 2012). A weaker version of the former view regards human thought as influenced by language and culture (see Sharifian 2015). Palmer maintains that although all of these three traditions also, either implicitly or explicitly, reveal an interest in cognition, none of them engage closely with the cognitive aspects of language and culture. For Palmer, here lies the gap that could be filled by cognitive linguistics, with its emphasis on the relationship between language and cognition, as conceptualisation. Central to Palmer’s proposal is the idea that ‘language is the play of verbal symbols that are based in imagery’ (Palmer 1996: 3; emphasis added), and that this imagery is culturally constructed. Palmer argued that culturally defined imagery governs narrative, figurative language, semantics, grammar, discourse, and even phonology. Palmer’s notion of imagery is not limited to visual imagery. As he puts it, ‘[i]magery is what we see in our mind’s eye, but it is also the taste of mango, the feel of walking in a tropical downpour, the music of Mississippi Masala’ (Palmer 1996: 3). He adds, ‘phonemes are heard as verbal images arranged in complex categories; words acquire meanings that are relative to image-schemas, scenes, and scenarios; clauses are image-based constructions; discourse emerges as a process governed by reflexive imagery of itself; and world view subsumes it all’ (Palmer 1996: 4). Since for Palmer the notion of imagery captures conceptual units such as cognitive categories and schemas, my terminological preference is C 2015


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the term conceptualisation rather than imagery. I elaborate on my use of this term in the following sections. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS AND CULTURAL CONCEPTUALISATIONS

Palmer’s proposal for Cultural Linguistics paved the ground for further theoretical advancements (Sharifian 2011) and empirical investigations (Yu 2009a, 2009b; Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009) as well as applied research in areas where the interaction between language and culture proved to be paramount (Sharifian & Palmer 2007). On the theoretical front, the model of cultural conceptualisations and language (Sharifian 2011) is an attempt to provide a broader frame for understanding the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualisation by advancing the notion of cultural cognition: a group-level, collective cognition that emerges from the interactions between the members of a speech community across time and space. The model draws on several disciplines and sub-disciplines including cognitive anthropology, distributed cognition, complexity science, and cognitive linguistics. The framework of cultural cognition and language subscribes to the cognitive anthropological view of ‘culture as an inter-subjectively shared cognitive system’ (D’Andrade 1995), but it views this cognitive system to be a form of ‘distributed cognition’ (Hutchins 1994), albeit heterogeneously shared between the members of the speech community. Viewed this way, cultural cognition reveals some properties of complex adaptive systems, such as the parts constituting the system not being able to contain the whole. That is, an individual’s cognition does not capture the totality of the cultural cognition present on a group level. The framework shares the central view of cognitive linguistics, that is, meaning is conceptualisation, but regards conceptualisation as predominantly culturally constructed. Each of these themes requires a more detailed discussion, although this falls beyond the scope of this paper (see Sharifian 2011 for more details). In general, Cultural Linguistics views the relationship between language, thought and culture to be a complex, dynamic and multidirectional one, with the human conceptual faculty acting as an active agent mediating between cultural experience and human language. This view runs counter to such deterministic and rather simplistic propositions, as the one that views human languages as structuring and shaping human thought and worldview. It is worth noting that although the latter is often attributed to scholars such as Sapir and Whorf, in recent decades others have presented much more sophisticated accounts of the views held by these scholars (see Lee 1996). The major analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics are cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural-conceptual metaphors. These conceptual units are closely associated with various features of human languages. The following section elaborates on each of these notions and explores the ways in which they underpin features of human languages. CULTURAL SCHEMAS AND CATEGORIES

Over the last century, the notion of ‘schema’ has proved to have very high explanatory power across various disciplines including cognitive science, education, artificial intelligence, cognitive anthropology, and linguistics (Bartlett 1932; Bobrow & Norman 1975; Minsky 1975; Rumelhart 1980; D’Andrade 1995; Holland & Cole 1995; C 2015


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Strauss & Quinn 1997; Sharifian 2001). The Cambridge dictionary of psychology (Matsumoto 2009) defines a ‘cognitive schema’ as follows: A mental representation of some aspect of past experience or some part of one’s general knowledge. Schemas are a basic unit of analysis in some areas of cognitive psychology. It is supposed by cognitive psychologists that schemas are constantly being created, modified, and imposed on perceptions, situations, understanding, and processes. (Matsumoto 2009: 116)

Cultural schemas are a class of schemas that are culturally constructed and serve as a basis for communicating and interpreting cultural meanings (Strauss & Quinn 1997). A typical example often provided for a cognitive schema is that of ‘the restaurant schema’, which includes knowledge about sub-events such as ordering, eating, tipping, paying the bill, etc. It is clear that although the schema of ‘restaurant’ is common to many cultures, there are differences in the content of restaurant schemas across cultures, for example, in terms of the sub-events, type of food served, etc. Cultural schemas capture encyclopaedic meaning that is culturally constructed for lexical items of human languages. Palmer (1996: 63) maintained that ‘[i]t is likely that all native knowledge of language and culture belongs to cultural schemas and the living of culture and the speaking of language consist of schemas in action’. Take the example of the word ‘privacy’ in for example, American English. The knowledge that forms the web of concepts that define ‘privacy’ in relation to various contexts and factors is best described as the cultural schema of PRIVACY. The cultural construction of this schema is partly reflected in complaints that some speakers make about members of various other speech communities, such as ‘they don’t understand the meaning of privacy’. Cultural schemas also provide a basis for pragmatic meanings, in the sense that the knowledge which underlies the enactment and uptake of speech acts is largely culturally constructed and captured in cultural schemas assumed to be shared. In some languages, for example, the speech act of ‘greeting’ uses semantic items associated with cultural schemas of ‘eating’ and ‘food’, whereas in some other languages it is associated with cultural schemas that relate to the health of the interlocutors and their family members. The available literature in the area of pragmatics makes very frequent references to ‘inference’ and ‘shared assumptions’ as the basis for the communication of pragmatic meanings (Levinson 1983). It goes without saying that any view of speakers making inferences or assumptions about the knowledge of the hearers technically implies that cultural schemas are necessary for making sense of speech acts. In short, cultural schemas integrate pieces of associated knowledge and provide a basis for a significant portion of semantic and pragmatic meanings in human languages. Another class of cultural conceptualisation is that of cultural category. Categorisation is one of the most fundamental human cognitive activities. Many studies have investigated how children engage in categorising objects and events early in life (Mareschal, Powell & Volein 2003). Children usually begin by setting up their own categories, but they explore and discover, as part of their cognitive development, how their language and culture categorise events, objects, and experiences. As Glushko, Maglio & Barsalou (2008: 129) put it, ‘[c]ategorization research focuses on the acquisition and use of categories shared by a culture and associated with language – what we will call “cultural categorization”’. C 2015



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Cultural categories exist for objects, events, settings, mental states, properties, relations and other components of experience (e.g. birds, weddings, parks, serenity, blue and above). Typically, these categories are acquired through normal exposure to caregivers and culture with little explicit instruction. The allocation of many objects, events and experiences into categories such as ‘food’, ‘vegetables’, ‘fruit’, etc., and their prototype instances, are culturally constructed. It should be noted that the reference to ‘weddings’ in the above quotation as a category is distinct from the use of this word in relation to cultural schemas. ‘Wedding’ as a cultural category refers to the type of event that is categorised as ‘wedding’, for example, as opposed to ‘engagement’ or ‘dining out’. ‘Wedding’ as a cultural schema includes all other aspects of the event, such as the procedures that need to be followed, the sequence of events, the roles played by various participants and the expectations associated with those roles. As for the relationship between cultural categories and language, many lexical items act as labels for the categories and their instances. As mentioned above, in English the word ‘food’ refers to a category, and a word such as ‘steak’ is an instance of the category. Usually categories form hierarchies, in that instances of a category can themselves serve as categories with their own instances. For example, ‘pasta’ is an instance of the category of ‘food’ while also being a category with its own instances, such as ‘penne’ or ‘rigatoni’. CULTURAL-CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS AND LANGUAGE

A major analytic tool within cognitive linguistics is that of ‘conceptual metaphor’. Rather than seeing it as simply a figure of speech, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) characterised metaphor as fundamental to human thought and action. They argue that our ‘ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 545). Since our conceptual system structures how we perceive the world, then it follows that ‘the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 545). If language is closely linked to our conceptual system, it serves as a rich source of data for exploring our conceptualisations including conceptual metaphors. One of the examples that Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 456) give is the conceptual metaphor of TIME IS MONEY, reflected in expressions such as ‘You’re wasting my time’, ‘You need to budget your time’, and ‘Do you have much time left’? In recent years, many studies have shown how a close analysis of language use can highlight underlying conceptual metaphors (Cameron & Low 1999; Cameron & Maslen 2010; Yu 2009a, 2009b). The notion of conceptual metaphor is also central to Cultural Linguistics, in that it focuses on exploring the cultural basis of conceptual metaphor (Sharifian et al. 2008; Yu 2009a, 2009b). As Yu (2003: 14) maintains, ‘the relation between metaphor, body, and culture is extremely intricate, with all of them mingled together, and each of them penetrating the others, giving rise to a colourful spectrum of cognition’. Chapters in Sharifian et al. (2008) explore cultural traditions that have given rise to conceptual metaphors of internal body organs, as for example, THE HEART AS THE SEAT OF EMOTIONS, showing that the links between particular organs and their associated emotions are not universal. In Indonesian, for example, it is hati ‘the liver’ that is associated with love (Siahaan 2008). Siahaan traces back this conceptualisation to the ritual of animal sacrifice, especially the interpretation of the liver organ known as ‘liver divination’, which was practised in ancient Indonesia. Yu (2009b) explores the origin of the conceptualisation of xin ‘heart’ in ancient Chinese C 2015


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philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. According to the Chinese conceptualisation, as well as the physiological centre of the human being the heart is traditionally believed to be the central faculty of cognition, and even, in a cosmic view, the ‘mirror of the universe’. In other words, the heart is seen as governing the entire body, including the brain. Yu reveals how this conceptualisation is still widely manifested in the Chinese language today.

CULTURAL CONCEPTUALISATIONS AND SCHEMAS IN WORLD ENGLISHES

Thus far, the varieties of English that have been significantly explored from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics are African Englishes (Polzenhagen & Wolf 2007; Wolf 2008; Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009) Aboriginal English (Malcolm & Rochecouste 2000; Malcolm & Sharifian 2002; Sharifian 2001, 2002, 2005, 2007), and an emerging variety that I have called ‘Persian English’ (Sharifian 2010a, 2010b). These strands of research have revealed how Cultural Linguistics can account for the localisation of English as certain cultural conceptualisations are encoded in various features of the English language. The widespread global spread of English has resulted in an increasing number of cultures becoming associated with English (Smith 1983) thus giving rise to the development of more and more of varieties of English. The paradigm of world Englishes therefore stands to benefit from adopting an approach that can examine the interrelationship between language and culture, and this is what Cultural Linguistics offers. The following sections present examples of cultural conceptualisations in several varieties of English to reveal the power of examining varieties of English from a Cultural Linguistics perspective. In the course of the development of new varieties of English, speakers associate English words with cultural schemas that were not originally associated with English words. For example, the word ‘law’ in Aboriginal English refers to cultural schemas that capture bodies of rules, values and traditions that relate to many of aspects of social life among Aboriginal people, from rules of polite behaviour to rules whose breach could entail serious punishment such as spearing. A report on the recognition of Aboriginal law (Australian Law Reform Commission 2012) observes that ‘most systems of indigenous customary laws include customs or principles which may appear to observers to be more like rules of etiquette or religious beliefs, as well as other more obviously “legal” rules and procedures’. Another example of a word in Aboriginal English that signifies an Aboriginal cultural schema is ‘language’, which has a special symbolic significance to Aboriginal speakers. Language ‘is much more than just words. It’s a direct link to land and country. It holds traditional songs and stories’ (Aboriginal elder Joan Tranter, cited in New South Wales Reconciliation Council 2011). According to the Aboriginal worldview, ancestor beings created the land and the people during the Dreamtime and ‘planted’ the Aboriginal languages in different Aboriginal ‘countries’. Thus, ‘language’ links Aboriginal people to their land (see more in Rumsey 1993). The word ‘country’ in Aboriginal English captures culturally constructed geographic boundaries, and as such the word instantiates an Aboriginal cultural category. An example of a cultural schema associated with an English word from an African variety is the word ‘outdooring’ (an adjective turned into a noun) in Ghanaian English (De Bruijn 2006) which is used to refer to a child naming ceremony. Dzansi (2002: 2) describes such ceremonies as follows: C 2015



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During naming ceremonies, the newborn baby is given water and any local brewed gin to taste, symbolizing the facts of life, and to bless the child that he or she may be a truthful member in the community, and be able to differentiate good from evil when he or she grows up.

Another example from Ghanaian English is the word ‘divine’, which is used to capture a Ghanaian cultural schema that involves ‘contact with unseen world to discover reason behind a misfortune, evil etc.’ (Blench 2006). The phrase ‘disappearing medicine’ is used in this variety of English to instantiate a cultural schema that is associated with ‘magic which helps drivers to escape accidents’ (Blench 2006). In general, a glance at the Dictionary of Ghanaian English (Blench 2006) reveals that many words in this variety of English are associated with Ghanaian cultural conceptualisations. It should be noted that in these cases, the English words are not simply associated with new meanings but new cultural schemas, which are impossible to fully explicate in a sentence or two. For example, for outsiders to the culture to have a full understanding of the definition of ‘divine’ in Ghanaian English would require an understanding of what other words such as ‘unseen world’ and ‘contact’ evoke for the native speakers of the variety. As mentioned earlier, cultural schemas may also provide a basis for pragmatic meaning. For example, the Persian cultural schema of tâ’arof (also spelt as tarof, taarof, or târof) is associated with several speech acts including making a request, offering an invitation, making a complaint, making a refusal, accepting an offer, etc (see more in Sharifian 2010a, 2010b). Its realisation in conversations may be in the form of ‘ostensible’ invitations, repeated rejection of offers, insistently repeated offers, hesitation in making requests, frequent compliments, hesitation in making complaints, etc. Often, a combination of these occurs, to varying degrees, within one conversation. The general aim of the cultural schema of târof is to create a form of social space for speakers to negotiate face work and also to provide communicative tools to lubricate social relationships. It is also a pivotal part of what defines ‘politeness’ and a ‘polite’ person among speakers of Persian. Speakers of Persian usually use expressions such as ‘ritual courtesy’ in their use of English to refer the concept of aˆ beru. They may also use the original Persian word in their use of English for intra-cultural communication with other speakers of Persian. A glance at some Persian internet chat rooms revealed examples such as the following: (1) A: What do you do that is very Persian? B: Me . . . I tarof a lot

The following is another example from an online blog: (2) I haven’t given up the habit of ta’arof, but now I say it up front that it is a cultural habit . . . (‘MadarPedar’ n.d.).

A Google search delivers thousands of pages either trying to explain what has been labelled as ‘untranslatable taarof’ (also spelt as ta’arof) in Persian culture or asking for an explanation of it. That many Persian speaking members of the Iranian diaspora have posted explanations of târof on the web suggest their awareness of the culture-specificity of this cultural schema. The following excerpts are from a web posting by a retired dentist and freelance writer living in San Diego: C 2015


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One of the most complicated aspects of Persian culture – and language – is the untranslatable ta’arof. Depending on the circumstance, it can mean any number of things: to offer, to compliment and/or exchange pleasantries. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I doubt if any study can lead to a full understanding of Ta’arof. A born and raised Persian, even I find myself losing my grasp on it from time to time . . . Those of us who have lived in the West for decades may feel westernized, but when it comes to Ta’arof, we remain Persians. I knew this when the other day at the local hamburger joint my teenage son grabbed the bill in the air before it reached me (Khazai Ghahremani 2005).

Thus this Persian speaking writer who has lived in the USA for decades maintains that târof is still very much part of the culture of the Persian speaking diaspora. Overall, the example of târof clarifies how the enactment of speech acts may be associated with a cultural schema. The use of English to instantiate pragmatic meanings that derive from cultural schemas that have traditionally not been associated with English is a significant part of the process of the localisation of English.

CULTURAL CATEGORIES IN WORLD ENGLISHES

An example of a world Englishes cultural category comes from Singaporean English where the word ‘aunty’ refers to any female person who is middle-aged or older and who is ‘not very well-informed, probably because she has undergone very little formal education’ (Wong 2006: 457–8). Wong maintains that ‘people do not seem to think that aunties know much about social etiquette, presumably because they mostly come from a traditional, humble background’ (Wong 2006: 458). Wong observes that this cultural category is a by-product of a tension between two culturally differentiated generations in Singapore: (a) the new generation who has received an English-medium education and who is westernised; and (b) the older generation ‘many of whom have not undergone much formal education, cannot read or write any form of English, are not computerliterate, and are generally perceived to be conservative, old-fashioned, and set in their ways of thinking’ (Wong 2006: 461). Wong observes that ‘aunties’ generally belong to the latter group and maintains that this cultural category reflects ‘the mixed feelings – deference and distaste – that the younger community collectively harbours towards this dwindling breed of women and men in an increasingly modernized society and their preference for what is perceived to be more modern, Western ways of living and thinking’ (Wong 2006: 462). The co-option of another kinship term is found in Aboriginal English where ‘cousin’ captures a cultural category that includes any relative of a person’s own generation and implies certain cultural obligations. Eades (1988: 102), for example, notes that ‘[t]he use of the term of address “cuz” [short form for cousin] in a meeting or a tutorial in a tertiary institution, for instance, both maintains and reminds Aboriginal participants of a speaker’s relationship to another participant and the accompanying rights and responsibilities’. An example of cultural category outside the domain of kinship is the word ‘linguist’ which in Ghanaian English is used to refer to an ‘interpreter, spokesperson, especially attached to chiefs in southern tradition. Visitors must speak through the linguist even when the chief is familiar with their language’ (Blench 2006). It is clear that this conceptualisation of the category of ‘linguist’ has its roots in Ghanaian cultural traditions. C 2015



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CULTURAL-CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN WORLD ENGLISHES

As mentioned earlier, one of the major analytic tools of Cultural Linguistics is the culturally constructed conceptual metaphor, or in short, the cultural-conceptual metaphor. The importance of exploring cultural-conceptual metaphors in world Englishes is reflected in the following quote from Honna (2010: 65): We need to be trained in metaphorical awareness so that we can be sensitive to and tolerant of different but interesting metaphorical expressions originating from speakers of other cultures[ . . . ] Actually metaphor has a lot to do with our better understanding of world Englishes and Asian Englishes.

A pioneering investigation of conceptual metaphor in varieties of English was conducted by Hans-Georg Wolf and his colleague Frank Polzenhagen who examined the conceptual basis of African varieties of English. They explored, for example, conceptualisations of the African cultural model of community and its associated conceptual metaphors in African varieties of English. Wolf (2008: 368) maintains that this ‘cultural model involves a cosmology and relates to such notions as the continuation of the community, the members of the community, witchcraft, the acquisition of wealth, and corruption, which find expression in African English’. For example, by examining a number of expressions in Cameroon English (e.g. ‘they took bribes from their less fortunate brothers’), Wolf finds that the central conceptual metaphors in that variety of English are KINSHIP IS COMMUNITY and COMMUNITY IS KINSHIP (Wolf 2008: 370). An example of a cultural-conceptual metaphor from Aboriginal English is that of LAND AS KIN. This excerpt from an Aboriginal English speaker elaborates on Aboriginal conceptualisations of the land: (3) You see my people see land ownership as being totally different to the English way of ownership because we, ours used to be really the land owns us and it still is that to us. You know the land ah, grows all of us up and it really does, no human is older than the land itself it just isn’t and no living marsupial is as old as the land itself. Everything that’s been and gone with life in the flesh has died but the land is still here (Randall 2009: online video).

As reflected above, the Aboriginal conceptualisation of the relationship between people and the land is that of ‘the land owns us’ and ‘the land grows us up’. The general underlying conceptualisation here is that of LAND AS KIN, whereas the dominant understanding from the perspective of Anglo-Australian is rather ‘land is a possession that can be bought and sold’. Another closely related Aboriginal conceptualisation of the land is that of LAND AS A HUMAN BEING, which can be seen in the following excerpt from an Aboriginal elder: (4) If you look at the land and you watch the land talk to you boy you know you won’t starve, you won’t go thirsty, you know it’s there to show you. It’s talking to you all the time, every time a blossom blooms, every time different coloration and that come on your plants and your trees and that you look at it and you start to understand it and you say ‘now what’s it doing that for . . . why is it goin’ like that’ and then you watch it next time it comes around and then and then the penny drops you know then ‘oh so that’s what that’s happened’ there with that see so it’s things like this that people have got to start to understand about, um about our people and their lifestyle (Harrison 2009: online video). C 2015


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It can be seen that in the above the speaker characterises the land as being able to talk to people, care for them and provide for them. The land does this, for example, by communicating to people through natural events, such as blossoming buds and colour changes in plants. This kind of characterisation of the land is consistent with the conceptualisation of land as close kin, in particular as a mother or father. In the Aboriginal worldview, land also enjoys a sacred position and is strongly associated with Aboriginal spirituality, a topic that has long been a matter of significant debate and conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal speakers. This is best reflected in the following excerpt from the same interview of the same elder: (5) Um if we said that that place was sacred over there you know across Uluru. If I sat down I was tellin’ a lot of politicians or someone you can’t develop over there because that place is sacred over there and the first thing that they would do, then they would go and they would look to see what was sacred about it or they would try and bring the sacredness down, and you know they’d say ‘well so what’s sacred about it?’ You know but they can’t understand the energy or the ceremonies that went into the land and the singing that went into the land, into the rocks ah into the trees ah they cannot understand that and ah and so they’ve got to look to find some to identify something there. They’re trying to look for that sacredness thing, you can’t see sacredness (Harrison 2009: online video).

The sacredness that is referred to in this excerpt is associated with many aspects of the environment, such as rocks, hills, lakes, trees, and the like, for Aboriginal people. This spirituality is rooted in the worldview of Aboriginal people, according to which, as mentioned before, ancestor beings during the Dreamtime created the land, the people and the animals and at the end of their journey themselves turned into topographical features (Charlesworth et al. 1990). Thus the underlying cultural conceptualisation here is ANCESTOR SPIRITS ARE PART OF THE LAND. It should be mentioned here that what is identified as conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics is revisited in Cultural Linguistics in the sense that some cases of conceptual metaphor do not appear to involve any conscious mapping from one source to another on the part of the speaker, but are rather entrenched in cultural belief systems, such as those of worldview and religion. That is, in these cases, the underlying conceptualisation provides a frame of thought and is based on what the speakers of the language or language variety consider to be real, rather than being simply a figure of speech or conscious creative mapping from one domain to another. For example, in the above-mentioned cases of the Aboriginal conceptualisation of the land, the speakers do not generally view the underlying conceptualisation as metaphorical; rather they view it as descriptions of reality, rooted as they are in the Aboriginal worldview. Thus, Cultural Linguistics acknowledges that what is described as conceptual metaphor from the etic perspective is in many cases an aspect of the speaker’s worldview, involving no conceptual mapping from the emic perspective. A more neutral, and therefore more appropriate, term to use in such cases is the umbrella term of Cultural Linguistics: cultural conceptualisation (Sharifian 2011). Cultural Linguistics has also been recently used in compiling a dictionary of Hong Kong English. In a very innovative project, Cummings and Wolf (2011: 163–164) have supplied the underlying cultural conceptualisations for many of the words included in the dictionary. The following is an example of an entry: C 2015



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Spirit money (also paper money, hell money, hell bank notes) Fixes expressions, n. Definition. Fake money burned in a ritual offering to the dead Text example: ‘An offering of oranges may be peeled and placed on the grave, together with paper money. Finally, crackers are let off’. Underlying conceptualisations: A SUPERNATURAL BEING IS A HUMAN BEING, A PAPER MODEL IS A REAL OBJECT IN THE SUPERNATURAL WORLD [TARGET DOMAIN > SUPERNATURAL BEING, PAPER MODEL] [SOURCE DOMAIN > HUMAN BEING OBJECT IN THE SUPERNATURAL WORLD]

This groundbreaking step in the tradition of dictionary compilation allows readers to become familiar with the cultural conceptualisations, which in many cases are rooted in the cultural traditions – including that of religion and spirituality – that underlie certain expressions in the given language or the language variety. A CULTURAL LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE OF NEW ENGLISH VARIETIES

In terms of the identification of varieties of English, Cultural Linguistics offers an innovative approach, revealing that varieties of English may be distinct from each other mainly at the level of cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian 2005, 2006). Sharifian (2002, 2005, 2007) examined cultural conceptualisations in English spoken by a group of Aboriginal students who, because they sounded like speakers of Australian English, were not identified by their teachers as Aboriginal English speakers. Through a study of word association, however, the study found that English words such as ‘family’, ‘home’, and ‘shame’ evoked cultural conceptualisations in these students that were quite different from those of Australian English speakers. For example, for Aboriginal students the word ‘family’ appeared to be associated with categories in Aboriginal English that extend far beyond the ‘nuclear’ family, the central notion in Anglo-Australian culture. Consider Table 1, which presents data from Sharifian (2002: 158–9). The responses given by the Aboriginal participants instantiate the Aboriginal cultural schema of ‘family’ as they refer to members of their extended family, such as aunts and uncles. The responses from the Anglo-Australian participants suggest that the word ‘family’ is, in most cases, restricted to the nuclear family, which sometimes includes house pets. Responses such as they’re there for you, when you need’m they look after you by Aboriginal participants reflect the responsibilities of care that are very alive between the members of an extended family. Uncles and aunties often play a large role in an individual’s upbringing. The closeness of an Aboriginal person to his or her extended family members is also reflected in the patterns of responses where the primary responses refer to uncles and aunties or nana and pop instead of father and mother. Responses such as my million sixty-one thousand family and I’ve got lots of people in my family reflect the extended coverage of the concept of ‘family’ in the Aboriginal conceptualisation. The word ‘home’ appeared to be mainly associated with family relationships in contrast with the association to a building used as a dwelling by a nuclear family, as is the case among Anglo-Australians. It must be reiterated here that the speech of students who participated in this study showed no significant differences from that of Australian-English speaking students. This is a significant finding in terms of the identification of varieties of English since it shows a variety of English may be distinctive predominantly in terms of its underlying system of cultural conceptualisations, which for example provide a basis for semantic and pragmatic C 2015


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Farzad Sharifian Table 1. Aboriginal versus Anglo-Australian conceptualisations of ‘family’

Aboriginal stimulus word: Family

r r r r r r

r r

Love your pop, love your nan, love our mums, love our dads. Brothers, sisters, aunnie, uncles, nan, pops, father, nephew and nieces. They’re there for you, when you need ‘m they look after you, you call ‘m aunie and uncle an cousins. People, mums, dads, brother, group of families, like aunties and uncles nanas and pops. I’ve got lots of people in my family, got a big family, got lots of family. My family, you know how many family I got? One thousand millions, hundred ninety-nine million thousand thousand nine nine sixty-one . . . million million, uncle, Joe, Stacy, . . . cousins, uncles, sisters, brothers, girlfriends and my million sixty-one thousand family I like my family, all of my family, my aunties an’ uncles and cousins, and I like Dryandra. Just having family that is Nyungar [an Aboriginal cultural group] and meeting each other.

Anglo-Australian stimulus word: Family

r r r r r r r r r r r

You got brothers and sisters in your family and your mum and dad, and you have fun with your family, have dinner with your family, you go out with your family. Dad, mum, brother, dog. Mum, and dad, brother and sister. Fathers, sisters, parents, caring. People, your mum and dad, and your sister and brother. All my family, my brothers and sisters, my mum and my dad. Kids, mums, dads, sisters, brothers. Mother, sister, brother, life. Mum, dad, my brother. I think of all the people in my family [F: Who are they? I: My mum, my dad, an my sister They have a house, they have a car, they have their kitchen, their room, their toilet, their backyard, their carport, they have a dog and a cat.

Source: Adapted from: Sharifian (2002: 158–9).

meanings, without any correlation with surface features of phonology and syntax. This has serious implications for establishing criteria for what would count as a new variety of English. In the past, attention has been paid to considerations such as the codification of a variety, a variety merely having a significantly distinct phonology, grammar, and to some extent distinct lexicon in the availability of literature in the variety and its acceptance in society. From the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, it is the adoption of English to encode and express deeper levels of cultural conceptualisations by communities of speakers that lead to the development of new varieties, rather than relying on the existence of reference work, literature, history, and institutional recognition, criteria that fall outside the domain of the interaction between language, culture, and conceptualisation. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS AND WORLD ENGLISHES AS CRITICAL APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Since its inception, the paradigm of world Englishes has presented itself as adopting a critical approach to applied linguistics and linguistics, in particular to second language C 2015



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acquisition (see Bolton 2005). Kachru (1991), for example, questioned the benefit of adopting the so-called ‘native speaker norms’ in English language teaching (ELT) contexts where the local variety of English is in his terms an Outer Circle variety, such as Indian English. Cultural Linguistics has also provided a basis for a critical approach to applied linguistics, in particular to the literacy education of the speakers of ‘non-standard’ varieties of English. For example, research on Aboriginal English from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics has revealed significant miscommunication between these children and their non-Aboriginal educators, which has to a large extent disadvantaged Aboriginal students. Aboriginal English is not recognised by many educators as a legitimate variety of English, and where it shows characteristic surface features, these are merely treated as an incorrect form of the language. This observation is not limited to Aboriginal English and characterises the imbalance of power between varieties of English in many other contexts. As Davis (2010: 32) puts it, ‘[t]he paradigm of world Englishes, and the linguists associated with it, continue to confront a world in which, to paraphrase Orwell, all varieties are created equal, but some varieties are more equal than others’. Lack of recognition of Aboriginal English by the educational system often lets intercultural miscommunication between Aboriginal students and non-Aboriginal educators and students go unnoticed. This leads to, among other things, a sizable drop out of Aboriginal students from school. On the other hand, in many urban areas, where the Aboriginal English spoken by Aboriginal students contains Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations but does not sound significantly different from Australian English, educators believe their Aboriginal students speak Australian English. In such cases it is highly likely that the possibility of miscommunication between students and their non-Aboriginal teachers is higher than in areas where Aboriginal students clearly speak a basilectal form of the variety. This hypothesis has been explored in two projects. One of these projects aimed at investigating possible misunderstandings by nonAboriginal teachers of stories told by Aboriginal students (Sharifian et al. 2004). A number of teachers were invited to listen to five stories and then recall them. After listening to each story twice they produced their recalls immediately. Significant misunderstandings on the part of non-Aboriginal teachers were revealed. The following is an example of how the recalled utterance differed from the original: (6) Original: An an den my uncle grabbed it [kangaroo] and said ‘you stupid kangaroo’ blew his head off. (7) Recalled: The uncle was sort of yelling and telling off the person who was driving saying, ‘What did you do?’ (Text 2, SC.)

In the original story (see Appendix), the Aboriginal child is telling the story of their kangaroo hunting experience as a comical recount (reflected in the features of the audio version of the story). However, the teacher said she thought the story was a sad one, and as can be seen above, she changed the content. In the original story, the uncle grabs and shoots the kangaroo, whereas in the recall, the uncle yells at and tells off the person who drove over the kangaroo. This teacher seems to have relied on her own schema according to which the act of shooting or running over a kangaroo would be cruel. In so doing she has comprehended the story in a way that is significantly different from that of the teller. By contrast, an Aboriginal education officer who was invited to listen and recall this story produced the following: C 2015


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(8) Talking about one time hunting, in the car chasing down the fence line, like most of us do, most of the kangaroos head toward the fence line anyways to jump it and to get away yeah so, must’ve hit a fence cos he ran over the barbed wire, popped the tyre, yeah so pretty much it from that story, what I caught onto anyway.

In this recall, the Aboriginal education officer acknowledges his familiarity with the cultural schema reflected in the passage by saying, ‘like most of us do’. The cultural schema is partly indexed in the excerpt ‘most of the kangaroos head toward the fence line anyways to jump it and get away yeah’. The following is another example of recall by a non-Aboriginal teacher: (9) Original: One of my Nannas could feel these little fingers that choking’er. Recalled: It was the smoke choking her. (Text 5, MT.)

The above original utterance was part of a story told by an Aboriginal child which featured a female spirit cooking in the kitchen of a relative. When the child’s Nanna came to pray so that the spirit would go out of the window, the spirit tried to choke her with its ‘little fingers’. In the recall, however, the teacher did not understand a spirit was present and thought the smoke was choking the child’s grandmother. A significant number of teachers misunderstood this story, mainly due to their ignorance of the cultural spiritual schema that informed the original narrative. In a follow-up project, the role of the participants was reversed (Sharifian et al. 2012). That is, a number of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students were invited to listen to a number of stories from children’s story books commonly used in Australian schools (e.g. Puss in boots). They were then asked to recall those stories. The aim was to explore any possible mismatch between the schemas that students would draw on to understand the stories and those that actually underlay them. As in the previous project, there were a significant number of cases where the recalls were different from the original stories, suggesting that the Aboriginal students relied on their own cultural schemas when making sense of the texts. This was only marginally the case with non-Aboriginal children. For example, take the case of the following summary of one of the stories, titled John Brown, Rose and the midnight cat (Wagner & Brooks 1978): (10) Rose, a widow, and her dog, John Brown, happily live together. They rely on each other for company, but when a cat appears in the garden, John Brown refuses to acknowledge it. Rose, however, is quite taken by the cat. Eventually Rose falls ill, and this distresses John Brown. He reluctantly chooses to welcome the cat into the home to help Rose get better.

The recall by several Aboriginal students revealed that the words ‘midnight’ and ‘cat’ triggered some spiritual schemas, according to which a dog can be a protector from spirits while a cat whose eyes shine in the night, would be a hostile messenger from the spirit world. The cat was understood as an omen of some ‘bad thing’ to come. Also, according to this schema fire can provide protection against pursuing spirits. In general, the results of the second project revealed a significant degree of miscomprehension of stories by Aboriginal students of stories that are intended to be unproblematic vehicles for developing English comprehension skills in the classroom setting. This miscomprehension was due to the fact that the students understood the stories in the light of their own cultural C 2015



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schemas. Overall, the findings of the two projects together supported the observation that there was significant potential miscommunication between Aboriginal students and their teachers whether or not the initiator of the communication was the student (recounting a personal experience) or the teacher deploying school literacy materials. This miscommunication was shown to be due to a mismatch between cultural schemas that Aboriginal students relied on and those that teachers drew upon, which were also reflected in the schemas that informed school literacy materials. This kind of miscommunication is not limited to the classroom but characterises the everyday life of Aboriginal people, disadvantaging them in all contexts where they come into contact with non-Aboriginal people (Eades 2007). All in all, the results of the research briefly referred to here, show the potential of Cultural Linguistics for exploring difficulties of intercultural communication, in particular where there are significant differences between the cultural conceptualisations that interlocutors rely on.

CONCLUSION

This paper presents a case for exploring varieties of English from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics. The global spread of English has led to the localisation of the language by many speech communities around the world. This localisation has partly taken place by as different speech communities used English to express their cultural conceptualisations. This is a phenomenon which may best be revealed by studies of these varieties of English from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics. In turn, world Englishes also provides rich sources of data for the examination of the interrelationship between language and cultural conceptualisations, and as such makes a significant contribution to the development of Cultural Linguistics. A unique contribution of Cultural Linguistics to studies of world Englishes is its potential to identify varieties of English which may be otherwise invisible in terms of their cultural-conceptual system, which may be their major source of divergence from other varieties. Similar to world Englishes, Cultural Linguistics adopts a critical perspective towards issues of language and power, in particular towards discrimination against speakers of marginalised varieties of English. Finally, the caveat should be expressed that the characterisation of varieties of English in terms of their cultural conceptualisations should not be confused with the characterisation of speakers. It is acknowledged that increasing trans-cultural mobility means many speakers have been exposed to interaction with more than one variety of English. As a result many draw on more than one system of cultural conceptualisations, as in the case of migrants engaging in multicultural contexts. Globalisation and the significant growth in human mobility is yielding speakers that may be termed trans-varietal, that is, speakers who may not be easily identified as simply speaking one major variety of English. This phenomenon needs much further examination, in particular from an empirical perspective.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The research that forms part of this article was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (ARC DP [DP140100353]).

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APPENDIX

Here’s Mervyn with his teacher again. Please listen to his yarn and try to remember as much as you can about it. M: an’ we – an’ we like this kangaroo like cause we couldn’t – couldn’t –’cause we they was all at dis water pond there was big mob of’em an’ um we ran over dis liddle one an’ we came back to look for it but it wasn’t there an’ um we went right along this water pond lookin’ for this one little one an’ then went under the car each time we tried to run it over so they—as they ran over the next hump they ran over one of the fences with them clipper things in it sharp things and the tyre went flat J: oh no! M: An’ an’ den my uncle grabbed it an’ said you stupid Kangaroo! blew his head off REFERENCES Australian Law Reform Commission. 2012. Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws. ALRC Report 31/7. http://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/report-31 (1 August, 2012). Bartlett, Fredrick C. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blench, Roger. 2006. A dictionary of Ghanian English. http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Africa/Ghana/Ghana %20English%20dictionary.pdf (29 August, 2012). Bobrow, Daneil G. & Daniel A. Norman. 1975. Some principles of memory schemata. In Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan M. Collins (eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science, 131–149. New York: Academic Press. Bolton, Kingsley. 2005. Where WE stands: Approaches, issues, and debate in world Englishes. World Englishes 24(1). 69–83. Cameron, Lynne & Graham Low (eds.). 1999. Researching and applying metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Lynne & Robert Maslen (eds.). 2010. Metaphor analysis: Research practice in applied linguistics, social sciences and the humanities. London: Equinox. Charlesworth, Max, Kimbe Richard & Noel Wallace. 1990. Ancestor spirits: Aspects of Australian Aboriginal life and spirituality. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Cummings, Patrick J. & Hans-Georg Wolf. 2011. A dictionary of Hong Kong English: Words from the fragrant harbor. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. D’Andrade, Roy G. 1995. The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Daniel R. 2010. Standardized English: The history of the earlier circles. In Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.), Routledge handbook of World Englishes, 17–36. New York: Routledge. De Bruijn, Esther. 2006. Problematic pidginizations: Who can accept Ghanaian English? http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/ ˜cpercy/courses/6362-debruijn.htm. (2 May, 2012.) Dzansi, Mary P. 2002. Some manifestations of Ghanaian indigenous culture in children’s singing games. International Journal of Education & the Arts 3(7). http://www.ijea.org/v3n7/ (20 June, 2015.) Eades, Diana. 1988. They don’t speak an Aboriginal language, or do they? In Ian Keen (ed.), Being black: Aboriginal cultures in ‘settled’ Australia, 97–115. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Eades, Diana. 2007. Aboriginal English in the criminal justice system. In Gerhard Leitner & Ian G. Malcolm(eds.), The habitat of Australia’s Aboriginal languages: Past, present, and future, 299–326. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Glushko, Robert J., Paul P. Maglio & Lawrence W. Barsalou. 2008. Categorization in the wild. Trends in Cognitive Science 12(4). 129–135. Harrison, Max. 2009. Duramunmun. Full interview with Max Harrison. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06UpQQQ7cBM (21 March, 2012.) Holland, Dorothy & Michael Cole. 1995. Between discourse and schema: Reformulating a cultural-historical approach to culture and mind. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26(4). 475–490. Honna, Nobuyuki. 2010. That restaurant is delicious [Japan]. Asian Englishes 13(2). 64–65. Hutchins, Edwin. 1994. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kachru, Braj B. 1991. Liberation linguistics and the Quirk concern. English Today 25(1). 3–13. Khazai Ghahremani, Zohreh 2005. Ta’arof. http://iranian.com/Ghahremani/2005/March/Taarof/index.html (10 March, 2009). Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. C 2015



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