Linguistic Manifestations of Cultural Differences Across National Varieties of English: A Methodological Survey

During the colonial and postcolonial periods the English language has been diversified to form many new, stable national varieties in many countries, notably in Asia and Africa. These new ‘Englishes’ are used in and express a wide range of different world regions, and consequently cultures. A recent linguistic research project, inspired by the sociological discipline of ‘cross-cultural analysis’, investigated whether these varying cultures find formal manifestations in texts representing different national varieties of English. The present paper focuses on methodological issues of operationalizing this research question, and expounds statistical procedures of testing frequency differences. These goals are pursued on two increasingly abstract levels of linguistic expression, namely terms representative of ‘dimensions of culture’ and abstract syntactic pattern schemes which may be supposed to be motivated by differences in cultural perspectives.