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. © 2013 World Communication Association.