Language, culture and values: towards an ethnolinguistics based on abduction and salience

Abstract

In recent work, I have laid the foundations of a framework which I refer to as applied ethnolinguistics, and which is intended as a tool that can be used in the advanced foreign language classroom to make students aware of the fact that the language they are learning contains numerous cues that can help them gain a better understanding of the cultural values generally upheld by native speakers of their chosen foreign language. The notions of languaculture, abductive reasoning, and salience will be integrated into what is hoped to be a coherent procedure for dealing with apparently inexplicable cultural behaviours. Six pathways, ethnolexicology, ethnorhetoric, ethnophraseology, ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, and ethnoaxiology, are proposed as specific directions guiding the process of language and culture teaching in a multicultural classroom.