Cultural linguistics

Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualization. Originally, this area grew out of an interest in integrating cognitive linguistics with the three traditions present in linguistic anthropology, namely, Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics, and the ethnography of speaking (Palmer, 1996). 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 sub-disciplines, such as complexity science and distributed cognition, to enrich its theoretical understanding of the notion of cultural cognition (Sharifian, 2011). Applications of Cultural Linguistics have enabled fruitful investigations of the cultural grounding of language in several applied domains such as world Englishes, intercultural communication, and political discourse analysis. This chapter elaborates on these observations and provides illustrative examples of
linguistic research from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics.