Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for?

Abstract

The term cultural scripts refers to a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, precise, and accessible to cultural insiders and to cultural outsiders alike. This result is only possible because cultural scripts are formulated in a tightly constrained, yet expressively flexible, metalanguage consisting of simple words and grammatical patterns which have equivalents in all languages. This is of course the metalanguage of semantic primes developed over the past 25 years of cross-linguistic research by the editors and colleagues in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. The present collection of studies demonstrates the productivity and versatility of the cultural scripts approach with case studies from five different parts of world - china, Columbia, Korea, Singapore, and West Africa - describing a widely differing selection of culture-specific speech practices and interactional norms. one recurrent theme is that the different ways of speaking of different societies are linked with and make sense in terms of different local cultural values, or at least, different cultural priorities as far as values are concerned. Cultural scripts exist at different levels of generality, and may relate to different aspects of thinking, speaking, and behaviour. The present set of studies is mainly concerned with norms and practices of social interaction.