Tag: (S) self-expression

(1994) English, Polish, Japanese – Cultural scripts

Wierzbicka, Anna (1994). ‘Cultural scripts’: A new approach to the study of cross-cultural communication. In Martin Pütz (Ed.), Language contact and language conflict (pp. 69-87). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.71.04wei [sic]

According to Edward Hall, writing in 1983, one element lacking in the cross-cultural field was the existence of adequate models that enable us to gain more insight into the processes going on inside people while they are thinking and communicating. It is the purpose of the present paper to develop and validate a model of the kind that Hall is calling for. The model developed here, which can be called the “cultural script  model”, offers a framework within which both the differences in the ways of communicating and the underlying differences in the ways of thinking can be fruitfully and rigorously explored. It is shown how cultural scripts can be stated and how they can be justified; this is done with particular reference to Anglo, Japanese, and Polish cultural norms.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2010) Cultural scripts and intercultural communication

Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Cultural scripts and intercultural communication. In Anna Trosborg (Ed.), Pragmatics across languages and cultures (pp. 43-78). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110214444.1.43

Insights from cross-cultural literature written in English by authors of non-Anglo backgrounds throw a great deal of light on the challenges of cross-cultural lives and cross-cultural encounters. NSM techniques allow the author to translate such experiential evidence into cultural scripts written in a controlled mini-language based on simple and cross-translatable words. The scripts can either portray how cultural insiders think, or they can specifically target outsiders and newcomers to a culture. The paper provides a large range of examples involving more than a dozen different languages in different social situations including, for example, Russian and English scripts for “making a request”, scripts against “criticizing the person you are with”, scripts for “pleasant interaction”, scripts against “blurting out what one thinks”, to mention just a few.

Although cultural scripts may be seen by some as stereotypes, their use, provided it is consistent with the “objective evidence” of lexical facts and the “subjective evidence” from bicultural writers, can lead to increased cross-cultural understanding and serve as a basis for intercultural training. The methodology of cultural scripts formulated in simple and universal human concepts can help explain shared assumptions and values embedded in ways of speaking in different languages and cultures and can at the same time be practically useful in intercultural education.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2015) Cultural scripts

Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). Language and cultural scripts. In Farzad Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 339-356). New York: Routledge.

Cultural scripts are representations of cultural norms that are widely held in a given society and are reflected in language. To be faithful to the “insider perspective” and at the same time intelligible to the outsider, these representations are formulated in simple words and phrases that are cross-translatable between English (the main lingua franca of the globalizing world) and any other natural language. This mode of representation was made possible thanks to the outcomes of the decade-long cross-linguistic semantic research conducted within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage programme. Cultural scripts articulate cultural norms, values, and practices using this metalanguage as a medium of description and interpretation.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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