1
 BACKGROUND
Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the
relationship between language, culture, and conceptualization. In the last decade,
Cultural Linguistics has also found strong common ground with cognitive anthropology,
since both explore cultural models, which are associated with the use of language. For
Cultural Linguistics, many features of human languages are entrenched in cultural
conceptualizations, including cultural models. In recent years, Cultural Linguistics has
drawn on several disciplines and subdisciplines to enrich its theoretical understanding of
the notion of cultural cognition. Applications of Cultural Linguistics have enabled
fruitful investigations of the cultural grounding of language in several applied domains.
In our presentation, we will elaborate on these observations and provide illustrative
examples of linguistic research from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics.
Three first-year students that present this topic are Nguyễn Đức Thuận, majoring in
English Studies, the other two Nguyễn Khánh Chi and Nguyễn Cao Sơn are just starting
to study Graphic Design. We have tried to gather as many relevant documents as
possible to support the topic and organize important key points that are beneficial to
make the manuscript well presented. Related research references are listed in the
references section.
This manuscript is a partial requirement to the English Preparation Course – TRS5
and to be presented to the Faculty of English – FPT University, Hoà Lạc , Hanoi,
Vietnam.
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to express our trustworthy appreciation to our engaging, supportive,
and knowledgeable teachers, especially our research advisor, Phạm Hồng Vân. She
constantly provides us with opportunities to conduct research and is invaluable
throughout the period. Her dynamism, vision, sincerity, and motivation have left an
indelible impression on us. She taught us the methodology for conducting the research
and presenting the findings as clearly as possible. Working and studying under her
supervision was a great privilege and honor. We are deeply grateful for what she has
provided to us.
We also like to express our gratitude for TRS501.2.P2, empathy, fun, and
supportive, for their understanding and patience during the study work discussion.
Although working on this is quite challenging, we learned a lot that we knew would be
helpful in our future work.
Finally, we would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to everyone who helped
us completely finish the research work, whether directly or indirectly.
 

2
 CONTENTS PAGES
TITLE PAGE………………………………………………………………1
BACKGROUND………………………………………………………….2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT………………………………………………....3
I. KEYWORDS AND IMPORTANT TERMINOLOGIES……………….
II. REASON FOR CHOOSING CULTURAL LINGUISTICS…………...
III.CULTURAL LINGUISTICS & INTERCULTURAL   
COMMUNICATION………………………………………
IV. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS & EMOTION RESEARCH ………….
V. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS & RELIGION…………………………
VI. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………….
REFERENCES…………………………………………………………… 
LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………
Figure 1. Synopsis of the theoretical and analytical frameworks of Cultural
Linguistics
Figure 2. The analytical framework of emotion research from the perspective of
Cultural Linguistics
Figure 3: Death in Buddhist
Figure 4: Death in Christianity

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. KEYWORDS AND IMPORTANT TERMINOLOGIES
Keyword research is like a compass for determining the best way to approach the
meaning of keywords through the available definitions; identifying keywords is like
finding the right keywords if you have found the key to the treasure. There are many
important keywords on economic topics in this report, and by using them, people can
easily read this report and learn more about cultural linguistics.
1. Aboriginal English: A dialect of Standard Australian English, in the same way as
Scottish English and American Englishes and English Englishes all differ from
each other. Aboriginal Englishes are the only regionally distributed dialects of
Australian English in this country, which is quite unusual for any country.
2. Emotion: A strong feeling, like the emotion you feel when you see your best
friend at the movies with a group of people who cause trouble for you.
3. Eulogistic: A speech, presentation, or writing that pays tribute to someone's
lifetime achievements can be described as eulogistic, such as the eulogistic video
that was shown at the legendary coach's retirement party.

3
 4. Buddhism: A religion of eastern and central Asia growing out of the teaching of
Siddhārtha Gautama that suffering is inherent in life and that one can be liberated
from it by cultivating wisdom, virtue, and concentration.
5. Christianity: A religion derived from Jesus Christ, based on the Bible as sacred
scripture, and professed by Eastern, Roman Catholic, and Protestant bodies.
 
 
Cultural Linguistics
Language is the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them
used and understood by a community. These include both lexical and grammatical
characteristics.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Since it involves a thorough,
methodical, objective, and accurate analysis of all facets of language, including its
nature and structure, it is referred to as a scientific study. The social and cognitive facets
of language are both of interest to linguists. It has been categorized as a social science,
natural science, cognitive science, or component of the humanities; it is regarded as
both a scientific field and an academic discipline.
Culture is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial,
religious, or social group or the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as
diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time. 
Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary sub-discipline of linguistics that
investigates the interface between language, culture, and conceptualization. Cultural
Linguistics is the explicit study of culturally based concepts that are encoded in and
communicated through features of human languages. The centrality of meaning as
conceptualization in Cultural Linguistics is due to cognitive linguistics, a discipline on
which Cultural Linguistics was founded.
Every language suits the expressive demands of the people who speak it. There is no
language that is better than another. However, language effectiveness equality should
not be mistaken with identification or interchangeability. In other words, if there had
never been a Czech national renaissance in the mid-19th century, and the Czech
language had died out and been supplanted by German, the Czech culture would have
gone out with it. It is impossible to convey the substance of Czech culture into German
without losing much of what makes Czech culture unique. Because culture and
language co-evolved, the matching of expressive requirements (culture) and expressive
capabilities (language) is unique to each speaking community. Czech is completely
suitable for expressing Czech culture, just as German is perfectly adequate for
expressing German culture. However, they cannot be switched since a language and
cultural mismatch endangers both. Again, empirical evidence for specific linguistic
differences with cultural significance will be presented in this article.

4
 Figure 1. Synopsis of the theoretical and the analytical frameworks of Cultural
Linguistics

Cultural Linguistics offers both a theoretical and an analytical framework for

investigating the cultural conceptualisations that underlie the use of human languages.
Figure 1 provides a synopsis of those two frameworks. The two circles on the left are a
depiction of the theoretical framework, with cultural schemas, cultural categories, and
cultural metaphors being particular instances of cultural conceptualisations. The two
circles at the bottom reflect the analytical framework, with cultural schemas, cultural
categories, and cultural metaphors being the analytical tools that Cultural Linguistics
operates with.

II. REASON FOR CHOOSING CULTURAL LINGUISTICS

Culture or Language comes first? This question should be rendered meaningless due
to the symbiotic interaction between culture and language. Culture is a part of language,
and language is a component of culture. They are inextricably linked.
The scholarly community, on the other hand, continues to see culture and language
as distinct entities, discounting the possibility that they could influence one another.
But, in fact, language is a component of culture since it serves as the medium for
practically all forms of cultural expression. Culture contains not just the monuments of

5
prose and poetry that reflect culture with a capital C, but also the jokes, sayings,
melodies, and idioms that keep a speech community together with a small c. Even music
lessons, silent artifacts in media such as clothing, dance and handicrafts are eventually
passed down from generation to generation, apprenticeships, recipes, and directions
communicate language. Indeed, language is regarded as the single most essential aspect
in shaping collective identity. Because language is the vehicle via which a group's
culture is expressed, if a group's distinctive language is gone, access to both forms of
cultural expression (lofty and ordinary) is permanently lost.

III. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS & INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

In the past, intercultural communication has been investigated primarily from the
perspective of linguistic anthropology. For instance, some thirty years ago
Contextualization cues were first discussed by Gumperz as a theoretical framework for
investigating cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. Using linguistic
and non-linguistic cues, he described these signals as "verbal and non-verbal
metalinguistic indications that serve to recover the context-bound presuppositions in
terms of which component messages are processed" by speakers in intercultural
communication. According to cultural linguistics, the cultural conceptualizations that
the interlocutors share greatly aid making indirect inferences during intercultural
communication. Cultural conceptualisations provide a basis for constructing,
interpreting, and negotiating intercultural meanings. These conceptualizations could be
those connected to their first language, others that they have access to as a result of
living in a certain cultural setting, or even brand-new ones that they have created as a
result of communicating with speakers from other cultures. In recent years several
studies have shown that in certain contexts, intercultural communication, and in
particular miscommunication, reflect differences in the ways in which various groups of
speakers conceptualize their experiences. In doing so they draw on their own cultural
schemas, categories, and metaphors. Cross-cultural variance at the conceptual level
necessitates, according to Wolf and Polzenhagen, "a substantially meaning-oriented and
interpretive approach to the study of intercultural communication," and Cultural
Linguistics provides just that. Sharifian analyzed it as an illustration of research on
cross-cultural communication done from the viewpoint of cultural linguistics.
Examples of misunderstandings between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal English
speakers that mostly resulted from non-Aboriginal speakers' lack of familiarity with
Aboriginal cultural conceptualizations referring to the spiritual realm. Many lexical
items and linguistic expressions in Aboriginal English are associated with spiritual
conceptualisations that characterize the Aboriginal world-view. These include words
such as “sing” and “smoke''. Take the following example from a conversation between a
speaker of Aboriginal English and a non-Aboriginal English speaker:

6
  My sister said, “When you go to that country, you [are] not allowed to let ‘em take
your photo, they can sing you”.
According to the Aboriginal cultural schema of “singing”, “to sing someone” is the
ritual used to cast a charm on someone with potentially fatal consequences. 
For example, if a man falls in love with a girl he might try to obtain strands of her
hair, her photo, or some such thing in order to “sing” her. This would make the girl turn
to him or, in the case of her refusal to do so, the “singing” could result in her falling sick
with a serious or even fatal illness. It is clear that unfamiliarity with the Aboriginal
cultural conceptualisations intimately associated with the use of words such as singing
could well lead to miscommunication. Another Aboriginal cultural schema associated
with an English word in Aboriginal English is “medicine” in the sense of ‘spiritual
power’. The following is an example of the use of the medicine in this sense, from a
conversation between the author of this chapter and an Aboriginal English speaker:
That when . . . my mum was real crook and she . . . she said, “I woke up an’ it was
still in my mouth . . . the taste of all the medicine cause they come an’ give me some
medicine last night” an’ she always tells us that you can’t move . . . an’ you wanna sing
out an’ say just . . . sorta try an’ relax. That happened to me lotta times I was about
twelve.
In this narration the speaker is remembering that once her mother was ill and that
she mentioned the next morning that “they” went to her and gave her some “medicine”
that she could still taste. She also describes her mother's reaction to the medicine as
wanting to shout and then forcing oneself to relax. Without having the requisite schema,
the audience of the above anecdote would be likely to think that they refer to medical
professionals who visited the mother after hours and gave her syrup or a tablet.
However, further discussion with the speaker revealed that her mother was referring to
ancestor beings using their healing power to treat her illness. It is clear from these
examples how unfamiliarity with Aboriginal cultural schemas informing Aboriginal
English can lead to miscommunication.
Another example of cultural schemas that are functioning cognitively in the
background in such instances of intercultural communication comes from Sharifian and
Jamarani (2011). The study examined how the cultural schema, called sharmandegi
‘being ashamed’, can lead to miscommunication between Persian and non-Persian
speakers. This cultural schema is commonly instantiated in Persian through expressions
such as sharmand-am (short for sharmandeh-am ‘ashamed) meaning ‘I am ashamed’, or
sharmandeham mikonin, meaning ‘you make me ashamed’. Such expressions are
usually used in association with several speech acts, such as expressions of gratitude,
offering goods and services, requesting goods and services, apologizing, accepting
offers and making refusals.
Here the use of sharmandegi is intended as an expression of awareness that the other
person has spent some time/energy in providing the speaker with goods and services

7
they were under no obligation to supply. The speaker acknowledges this by uttering a
“shame” statement, as if guilty because of this awareness. Although the cultural schema
of sharmandegi is very widespread and commonly drawn upon among speakers of
Persian, it can lead to miscommunication during intercultural communication between
speakers of Persian and non-Persian speakers. 

    IV. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS & EMOTION RESEARCH 

   Emotions have long been the topic of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic studies.
However, there is still no agreement on the degree of universality or cultural creation of
general human emotions. Emotions have a physical dimension as well as a conceptual
component, which is mostly culturally created, according to Cultural Linguistics.
Emotions are prone to schematisation, categorisation, and cross-domain
conceptualisation processes, and as a result, there are cultural schemas of emotion,
cultural categories of emotion, and cultural metaphors of emotion, all of which are
culturally generated, as their names imply. Simply said, various languages organize
emotions in different ways and may differ in the amount of categories they identify with
"fundamental" emotions like melancholy or happiness. To put it another way, various
languages may encode the "identical" feelings in different ways. Similarly, various
languages may link distinct metaphors with the same feeling when it comes to emotion
metaphors. For example, in one language, such as English, love may be connected with
the heart, whereas in another, such as Vietnamese, it may be associated with the belly.
Finally, emotion schemas reflect the values, attitudes, rituals, and so on that are
connected with each emotion category: speakers from various speech communities may
use culture-specific schemas to nurture distinct values or attitudes toward comparable
emotion categories. Wierzbicka  maintains that “different cultures take different
attitudes towards emotions, and these attitudes influence the way in which people speak.
Different cultural attitudes toward emotions exert a profound influence on the dynamics
of everyday discourse”. Furthermore, various cultures may encourage differing attitudes
in its members regarding the expressing or recording of emotions. What appears to be a
suitable feeling, or an acceptable amount of emotion, in one language may appear
improper, overstated, or understated in another.

8
 Figure 2. The analytical framework of emotion research from the perspective of
Cultural Linguistics

The word Sorry in Aboriginal English 

Sharifian's research on the use of the word Sorry in connection to the concept of
'grief' in Aboriginal English is yet another example of how Cultural Linguistics may be
applied to emotion research. The word sorry is commonly used in Australian (and other
types of) English to indicate various sorts of apology (which in certain situations have
legal ramifications), as well as sympathy. The situation is different in Aboriginal
English: in Australian Aboriginal cultures, for example, the apology speech act may be
executed through non-linguistic techniques such as silence. Consider the following
passage from (54), which was compiled as part of the Voices from the Heart of the
Nation project:
 Sometimes Kardiya [non-Aboriginal] people feel sorry for Yapa [Aboriginal]
people when they’re in Sorry and that means that they share their sorrows with us and
that’s really good. 
This extract contains two uses of the word sorry. The first word means ‘Sorrowful’,
and it implies 'empathy/worry/care for others.' The second relates to the culture-specific
event category of aboriginal mourning rituals, the rituals conducted when a death has
happened; it reflects Aboriginal English cultural conceptualisations. For obvious
reasons, there was no name for these rites in English, so an existing word (sorry) was
adopted - and capitalized so that the original English word and its Aboriginal English
equivalent could be distinguished. The term is generally incorporated in the phrase
sorry in its Aboriginal English sense, which is not common in other types of English.

9
The entire extract is about shared sorrow and might be contained in the proposition
schema. Occasionally, non-aboriginal people feel empathy for aboriginal people and
share their sadness when the latter are mourning a loss during their own specific
ceremonies.

The word Rain in Aboriginal English

The spirituality that characterizes Aboriginal English is not limited to the Land , but
influences many other aspects of the language. Words such as Medicine , Rain, and
many more, may be used to refer to Aboriginal spiritual experiences that are part of
Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations largely unfamiliar to non-Aboriginal speakers. In
this section, we look at the word Rain, which is often used to conceptualize the
emotions of the Ancestors: their sadness, for instance, or their anger. 
Excerpt below is taken from a conversation between the author and an Aboriginal
woman: 
Same like when it’s death or funeral times when it’s burial, might not, might be
good, and then this cloud comes and it’s the rain it’s called the midjal, it rain, it’s a sad
rain, it’s crying rain, … the old fallas crying for umm not crying for the falla who’s
gone cause they’re with them, they’re crying for the fallas that’re there, they’re cryin’
sad for watchin’ all the people mob cryin’, you know, and it’s a soft rain, a different
rain. 
The Aboriginal woman talks about the Rain as “sad rain”, “crying rain”, then goes
on to describe the Rain as “the old fallas crying” for the survivors of a deceased. “The
old fallas” are the Ancestor Spirits, whose ranks the deceased has joined; they are
weeping because they are saddened by the sight of people mourning and crying. The
cultural metaphor at work here is that of rain as tears of the ancestor spirits. 
Another use of the word Rain by the same woman is exemplified in excerpt below:  
That, that rain, the rain ‘ere, the angry rain, das when some, you done somethin’ or
someone’s done somethin’, that did bad an it’s like it’s not rainin’ and it comes and it’s
like bangin’, loud, sort of lashin’, makes the trees go shshsht, you know, hitti’ out that
sort of rain an’ it can come out like that but then you find out after someone doin’
somethin’, and you go th’as what it was…
In this passage, a particular type of rain is identified as “angry rain”; it falls when
someone has done something wrong (“someone doin’ something”). 
The next excerpt provides further information: “angry rain” could be the result of
“someone savage” earning the wrath of the Ancestor Spirits (“stirred them all them
fallas”) by breaking a cultural taboo or visiting a forbidden place, e.g., one of the Sacred
Sites of another Aboriginal group. 
Someone, if it’s not me, someone done something shouldna, something, something,
could be went out somewhere where they should’ve not went, might have went out to
[name of a place] might ’ve went to [name of a place], and coming back an then next

10
minute it’s starts raining but it’s a wind an it’s got the wind with it, that’s Warra rain
that is, tha’s Warra baad rain you know, that’s bad thing, someone savage stirred up
them all them fallas now 
From an outsider’s perspective, conceptualisations referring to “sad rain” or “angry
rain'' are comparable to those relating to the Land. They, too, are likely to be perceived
by non-Aboriginal speakers as unfamiliar and highly rhetorical.

V. CULTURAL LINGUISTICS & RELIGION

Religion and other spiritual systems embody certain worldviews or
conceptualizations of the universe, life, death, morality, creation, afterlife, fate, etc. An
effective method for investigating the language and conceptualizations connected to
these spiritual systems is through the use of cultural linguistics' analytical techniques.
After that, a look into Taiwanese cultural conceptions of Buddhism and Christianity is
presented. The examination of how Sacred Sites are conceived in Aboriginal English is
presented.

Conceptualizations relating to death in Buddhist and Christian eulogistic idioms

Buddhist and Christian eulogistic languages have different ways of conceptualizing
death. W. Lu's (2017) study, which focuses on cultural conceptualizations of death in
Taiwanese Buddhist and Christian eulogistic idioms, employs the framework of
Cultural Linguistics to explore the conceptual underpinnings of religion. To start, Lu
points out that funerals are a type of event and that they may be connected with a
variety of distinct customs and rituals depending on the speech community or religious
group. Lu's research is based on Mandarin funeral idioms that are kept in Taiwan's
official system for eulogy requests. The author notes that six important cultural
metaphors—death is rebirth, death is a journey towards rebirth, rebirth is west, life is a
circle, a person is a lotus, and heaven is full of lotuses—are reflected in the Buddhist
data through the idioms studied for the study. The Christian data reflects three
underlying cultural metaphors: heaven is an everlasting home, death is a trip back, and
death is rest. These cultural metaphors could be founded on underlying cultural schemas
in some cases.. For instance, the Taiwanese Buddhist cultural metaphor that "death is
rebirth" is congruent with the fundamental cultural belief in reincarnation, according to
which life and death constitute an endless cycle, with death marking both the end of one
life and the beginning of another. The idea that death and rebirth are west is congruent
with the cultural Buddhist idea that after death, people go to the Western Heaven and
that Buddha looks west to bless their souls. According to a Buddhist cultural schema in
which lotuses are regarded as symbols of holiness and purity, the metaphor that a person
is a lotus means that this person's life is pristine and clean. Similar to this, the
conceptualizations expressed in Christian idioms are congruent with the worldview that

11
defines Christianity and holds that, for instance, death is a journey back to the Lord.
According to Lu, an idiom may occasionally reflect more than one conceptualization.
Additionally, he observes that both groups seem to share some of the underlying
metaphors, such as the one that describes death as a journey.

Figure 3: Death in Buddhist

Figure 4: Death in Christianity

Conceptualizations relating to Sacred Sites in Aboriginal English 

The analysis of cultural conceptualizations associated with discourses of spirituality
is not necessarily limited to what has traditionally been labeled “religion”, but may
include any form of discourse around spirituality and sacredness. An example of such
discourse, by Wilfred Hicks, an Aboriginal Elder, appears in excerpt below: 
When you go to church you pray to the lord. We haven’t got a church. We learn our
people out in the bush. And all these rocks that’s got carving on, we teach the children
and sing the songs to them and that’s how they come to learn about culture. […] Our
Bible is getting ripped apart, and we’ll have nothing here to show them about our
culture law. 

12
 The Aboriginal Elder refers to “going to church” and uses the Bible as an analogy to
highlight the significance, to Aboriginal people, of what they refer to as their Sacred
Sites, many of which are being destroyed by mining companies. A piece of legislation
called the “Aboriginal Heritage Act '' has made this kind of destruction possible by
ruling that Sacred Sites had to be “devoted to a religious use”, and not merely subject to
“mythological belief ”. For Aboriginal people, Sacred Sites (which may be hills, rocks,
waterholes, trees, plains, and lakes) embody conceptualisations of activities of Ancestor
Beings in the Dreamtime. As such, they have immeasurable symbolic significance, in
the Aboriginal worldview, during the Dreamtime, Ancestor Beings created the Land, the
people, and the animals, and at the end of their journey turned into topographical
features. 
The excerpt in excerpt below reflects some other conceptualisations relating to
Sacred Sites: 
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. 
As can be seen in this excerpt, the Aboriginal speaker associates particular Sacred
Sites with the “energy”, the “ceremonies'', and the “singing” that have gone into them.
That is, the Land absorbs the spirit of the rituals that are performed on it and as such it
becomes Sacred. Many Aboriginal ceremonies, which involve singing, music, dance,
and visual art, depict Dreamtime Stories.

VI. CONCLUSION

This manuscript contains different aspects of cultural linguistics, including

keywords and important terminologies, cultural linguistics and intercultural
communication, cultural linguistics and emotion research, cultural linguistics and
religion. Using many sources of references, we made this research to inform the major
characteristics and the influences of Cultural Linguistics on daily communication and
language studies. We hope that our research can bring useful information to everyone as
well as provide this field of research with some small information. Hopefully, in the

13
future, this interesting field of Cultural Linguistics can be explored by researchers with
more interesting aspects.

REFERENCES
Arne Peters, Neele Mundt. (2021). Cultural Linguistics Applied - Trends,
Directions, and Implications.
Janda, L. A. (n.d.). From Cognitive Linguistics to Cultural Linguistics. Retrieved
from http://slovoasmysl.ff.cuni.cz/node/222.
Sharifian, P. F. (February 2017). Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Monash
University (Australia).
Sharifian, F. (2015). Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes.
Lu, W. (2017). Cultural conceptualizations of DEATH in Taiwanese Buddhist and
Christian eulogistic idioms. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), Advances in Cultural Linguistics

14