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Does language reflect culture? Evidence from Australian English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Anna Wierzbicka
Anna Wierzbicka
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Australian National University
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Abstract

This paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links – intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove – is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor (“if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them”). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as it does over the general public. The author proposes ways in which the linguist's methodological tools can be sharpened so that the apparently untractable and yet fundamental issues of “language as a guide to social reality” can be studied in ways which are both linguistically precise and culturally revealing. Linguistic phenomena such as expressive derivation, illocutionary devices, and speech act verbs are related to the literature on the Australian society, “national character,” history, and culture. (Ethnolinguistics, Whorfian hypothesis, Australian English, speech acts, expressive derivation, names)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , September 1986 , pp. 349 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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