World Englishes, 2015 0883-2919

doi: 10.1111/weng.12156

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: farzad.sharifian@monash.edu


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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 cog-
nitive 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 gov-
erns 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 con-
ceptual units such as cognitive categories and schemas, my terminological preference is

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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 ad-
vancements (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 theo-
retical front, the model of cultural conceptualisations and language (Sharifian 2011) is
an attempt to provide a broader frame for understanding the relationship between lan-
guage, 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 anthro-
pological 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 in-
dividual’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 me-
diating 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 cat-
egories, and cultural-conceptual metaphors. These conceptual units are closely asso-
ciated 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 explana-
tory 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;

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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 cogni-
tive 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 investi-
gated 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 cat-
egories shared by a culture and associated with language – what we will call “cultural
categorization”’.

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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 cul-
ture 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

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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 uni-
verse’. 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 pro-
cedures’. 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 cap-
tures 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:

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During naming ceremonies, the newborn baby is given water and any local brewed gin to taste, symbol-
izing 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 âberu. 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 . . . (‘Madar-
Pedar’ 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:

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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 computer-
literate, 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 re-
sponsibilities’. 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, spokesper-
son, 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.

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CULTURAL-CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN WORLD ENGLISHES

As mentioned earlier, one of the major analytic tools of Cultural Linguistics is the cultur-
ally 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).


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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 commu-
nicating 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:

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 Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes 525

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 innova-
tive 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 identi-
fied 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 Aus-
tralian 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

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526 Farzad Sharifian

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

Aboriginal Anglo-Australian
stimulus word: Family stimulus word: Family

r Love your pop, love your nan, love our
mums, love our dads.
r Brothers, sisters, aunnie, uncles, nan, pops,
father, nephew and nieces.
r They’re there for you, when you need ‘m they
look after you, you call ‘m aunie and uncle an
cousins.
r People, mums, dads, brother, group of
families, like aunties and uncles nanas and
pops.
r I’ve got lots of people in my family, got a big
family, got lots of family.
r 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
r I like my family, all of my family, my aunties
an’ uncles and cousins, and I like Dryandra.
r Just having family that is Nyungar [an
Aboriginal cultural group] and meeting each
other.
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.
r Dad, mum, brother, dog.
r Mum, and dad, brother and sister.
r Fathers, sisters, parents, caring.
r People, your mum and dad, and your sister
and brother.
r All my family, my brothers and sisters, my
mum and my dad.
r Kids, mums, dads, sisters, brothers.
r Mother, sister, brother, life.
r Mum, dad, my brother.
r I think of all the people in my family [F: Who
are they? I: My mum, my dad, an my sister
r 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

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 Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes 527

acquisition (see Bolton 2005). Kachru (1991), for example, questioned the benefit of
adopting the so-called ‘native speaker norms’ in English language teaching (ELT) con-
texts 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 associ-
ated 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 intercul-
tural 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 Aborig-
inal 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 non-
Aboriginal 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:

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528 Farzad Sharifian

(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 develop-
ing 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

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 Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes 529

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 miscommu-
nication 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, disad-
vantaging 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 po-
tential 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 lan-
guage by many speech communities around the world. This localisation has partly taken
place by as different speech communities used English to express their cultural con-
ceptualisations. 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 Linguis-
tics 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, Cul-
tural 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 characterisa-
tion 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 En-
glish. 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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530 Farzad Sharifian

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

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