Child-raising Values and Practices: Looking from the Inside

Abstract

This introduction to the special forum on the linguistic aspects of child-raising practices discusses the ethnocentric bias inherent in every natural language and proposes a way to minimize this bias. English is not culturally neutral. Words like ‘love’ and ‘happy’ are not suitable for cross cultural description because they reflect an English-specific perspective. However, while most words in any language are language-specific, research suggests that a small number of words and various combinations of these words to form clauses are universal. These words, called semantic primes, and their universal combinations constitute a meta-language that is minimally ethnocentric.

Keywords:

• Culture
• Ethnocentrism
• Ethnic identity
• Individualism/collectivism
• Intercultural communication
• Cross-cultural communication

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stephen Croucher, Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman, Kit Mun Lee, Bert Peeters, Brian Poole, Priscillia Pui and John Wakefield for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. For the purposes of this introduction, the word “Anglo” refers to traditionally white, native English speaking culture and its “descendants” (e.g. Anglo Australian, Anglo New Zealand). Anglo English refers to what scholars like Braj Kachru call “inner circle English” and what traditional sociolinguists call “native” English.