Cultural Conceptualizations of Moustache in Hungarian Language and Culture

Having a strong connection with gender characteristics, hair and facial hair are strongly associated with different cultural meanings. This is represented in various cultural models, which reflect a cultural community’s attitude toward several hairstyles and facial hair trends. Since the ancient civilizations, facial hair has been a strong marker of one’s membership in a community, admittance of its values, social position within the group, etc. This paper explores the cultural conceptualizations of bajusz (moustache) in Hungarian by employing a Cultural Linguistic analysis of its linguistic expressions. The language data upon which this analysis is based includes idioms, proverbs, and collocations retrieved from various dictionaries and handbooks, which is complemented by numerous expressions extracted from the Hungarian National Corpus. The study argues that bajusz (moustache) is a cultural category because it was an essential element of the cultural model of man throughout history on the one hand and also because the expressions frequently associated with it illustrate the ideal character of a Hungarian man. It is further shown that bajusz ‘moustache’ has various cultural conceptualizations including hungarian nationality, manliness, age, dignity, dominance, wisdom, sexuality, conflict, and hiding one’s opinion/feeling and emotions. The paper is a rather special contribution to the cross-cultural analysis of body parts in as much as it focuses on a specific of the external body which is easily changeable; therefore, it serves as a rich source of data for cultural variance and conceptualizations.