Patty Popp

March 9th, 2017

HONORS 211 C
Universal vs. Culture-Specific Aspects of Language

Over the course of this past quarter, we, as a class, have been able to aptly explore both

the universal and the culture-specific aspects of language and how they present themselves in our

lives. In Chapter 1 of Anna Wierzbicka’s Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human

Interaction, Wierzbicka first introduces the notion of interpersonal interaction and its role in

molding the words, categories, constructions, and linguistic routines which we make use of every

day. These modes of interaction depend heavily not only on what the two people want and who

they are, both as individuals and as members of their particular social, cultural, and ethnic

groups, but also on the cultural values and cultural norms which permeate their respective

society (Wierzbicka1). By making this claim, Wierzbicka is highlighting the importance of

separating a culture’s idiosyncratic aspects from its universal aspects, as every language must

consider itself as a self-contained system in which no words or constructions of one language can

have absolute equivalents in another (Wierzbicka1). As individuals, we remain within a certain

culture and thus are inevitably guided by certain principles, values, and ideas which we must

recognize to not be necessarily shared by the entirety of the human race – examples being the

Anglo values of individualism, respect for personal autonomy, cordiality, etc. (Wierzbicka1). For

example, the communicative value of a typical Australian utterance such as “Silly old bugger!”

cannot be appreciated fully without understanding the link between the use of “b-words” such as

bugger and bloody and the core Australian values of roughness, anti-sentimentality, sincerity,

etc. (Wierzbicka1) In order to compare or to state meanings of words, one needs a semantic

metalanguage independent, in essence, of any particular language or culture and yet accessible
and open to interpretation through any language, and that is where Wierzbicka’s natural semantic

metalanguage comes into play (Wierzbicka1).

The lexicon of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), as proposed by Anna

Wierzbicka, is based on a hypothetical system of universal semantic primitives which can be

matched to a considerable degree across different languages of the world and includes:

Pronouns Determiners Classifiers Adjectives

I this kind of good
you the same part of bad
someone two
something all

Verbs Modals Place/Time Linkers

want can place like
don’t want if/imagine time because
say after (before)
think above (under
know
do
happen

Upon considering language, it is impossible to start our inquiry in a complete conceptual

vacuum, as we innately will describe language through the prism of our own culture, thus

potentially distorting the original meaning or intent (Wierzbicka1). Therefore, it is of the utmost

importance that we study different cultures with a universal perspective, through the use of a

culture-independent analytical framework like NSM, and only then can we aim at both

describing it truthfully and at understanding it (Wierzbicka2).

In Wierzbicka’s Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words, Wierzbicka draws a

very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it.

Wierzbicka finds that it is clearly not an accident that Polish, for example, has special words for

cabbage stew (bigos), beetroot soup (barszcz), and plum jam (powidła), while English does not,
or that English, for example, has a special word for orange jam (marmalade), and Japanese a

word for a strong alcoholic rice-based drink (sake) (Wierzbicka3). The examples provided above

clearly reveal something about the eating or drinking habits of the people or cultures in question.

Apart from language-specific names for the visible, tangible things that we come across in our

day-to-day lives, we also encounter words for different customs and social institutions which are

unique to their respective cultures (Wierzbicka3). As an example, one might consider the German

noun Bruderschaft (literally brotherhood) which references the act of drinking as a pledge of

“brotherhood” with someone, subsequently addressing each other using the familiar “du”.

Clearly, the absence of this word in the English language can be attributed to the fact that

modern English no longer makes a distinction between an intimate/familiar “thou” and a more

distant “you,” and that English-speaking societies do not have a common ritual of pledging

friendship through drinking (Wierzbicka3). Wierzbicka emphasizes that what applies to material

culture and to social rituals and institutions also applies to people’s values, ideals, and attitudes

and to their ways of thinking about the world, providing the untranslatable Russian adjective

pošlyj and its derivatives as an example (Wierzbicka3). To call something pošlost’ would mean

to view them through the prism of a conceptual category provided by the Russian language. The

fact that a concept that is so exotic, foreign, and peculiar from an “Anglo” person’s point of view

is a salient, habitual mode of evaluation from a Russian point of view, further proves that many

aspects of language are indeed culture-specific, rather than universal.

Culture-specific words can serve as conceptual tools that reflect a society’s past

experience of doing and thinking about things in certain ways and they help to perpetuate these

notions (Wierzbicka3). As a society changes, these tools, too, may gradually adapt or even be

discarded – consider the transformation of the English connotations for friend, as an example.
The number of friends that a person can be expected to have has increased over time in all major

Anglo societies, and thus the word itself has diminished in meaning – with enjoyment replacing

affection at the center of this salient concept (Wierzbicka3).

Each language provides its own cognitive toolkit which encapsulates the knowledge and

worldview of perceiving, categorizing, and making meaning and this process is often developed

over thousands of years within a culture (Boroditsky). Similarly, the concept of “freedom” in the

English language has also been largely shaped by our nation’s culture and history, and is a large

part of the shared heritage of English speakers, proving to be vastly different from its Roman and

Russian counterparts of libertas and svoboda, respectively. Freedom – a word which we view to

embody a universal human right is layered in unique, culture-specific aspects of language to such

an extent that we must acknowledge its inability to be considered universal, despite potential

similarities present in other popular Western languages. To assume that people in all cultures

have the concept of “freedom” even if they have no word for it is like assuming all cultures have

a concept of “marmalade” and moreover, that this concept is somehow more relevant to them

than the concept of “plum jam”, even if they happen to have a word for the latter but not the

former (Wierzbicka3). To say this is not to argue against the existence of human universals, but

rather to call for a broader, cross-linguistic perspective in trying to identify and map them and

thus be able to explore the links between culture-specific and universal notions (Wierzbicka3).

All in all, it is important to recognize the existence and necessity of not only a universal

lexicon of human thought, but also of an innate and universal syntax (often outlined through

explications or cultural scripts). Only well-established linguistic universals can provide a valid

basis for comparing conceptual systems entrenched in different languages and for elucidating the

meanings which are encoded in some language(s) but not in others (Wierzbicka3).
 Works Cited

Boroditsky, Lera. "How Language Shapes Thought." Scientific American, 10 Jan. 2011. Web.

Wierzbicka1, Anna. Cross-cultural Pragmatics the Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin:

Mouton De Gruyter, 2003. Print.

Wierzbicka2, Anna. Semantics Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-

specific Configurations. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

Wierzbicka3, Anna. Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish,
German, and Japanese. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.