[Lingtyp] Two terminological quandaries for the price of one: 'traditional' and 'non-Western' cultures

Mon Jun 2 06:33:20 UTC 2025

I have resisted adding anything so far because I'm not convinced these are
coherent categories or that there are any good options for naming them.

Aside from the tone of "WEIRD", there is a particular insight to that
acronym: it emphasizes that WEIRD populations are statistically unusual.
Most languages and cultures are "not WEIRD" in both categorical and
statistical senses.

But "not WEIRD" is not a homogeneous category. In fact, the attempt to
label a categorical distinction seems to be essentially "homogeneous"
(WEIRD/European/Western/industrial/colonial...) vs. "non-homogeneous". More
directly, "heterogeneous" which makes salient the fact that this is not a
specific category. The obvious problem with using labels "homogeneous" and
"heterogeneous" is that these labels only make sense from a WEIRD-centric
perspective, and "hetereogeneous" (or equivalents) would be literally
othering. So we're back to where we started, with for example "familiar"
and "other", from the very point of view that the terms are trying to
avoid, but are in fact reinforcing by such distinctions. There are both
ethical/sociolinguistic and technical reasons to avoid this, I think, and
as others have pointed out, it is unclear what questions would require such
categorizations in the first place. If there is a causal connection (e.g.
contact) implied, then terms like "colonial" or "globalized" or
"minoritized" would be appropriate. The other problem is that this
terminological question is posed as a binary, when there is obviously a
range (with many relevant examples brought up in the previous messages).
But probably not just one continuum, without just one dimension to sort
each population. This goes back to heterogeneity of the situation. I'd be
tempted to suggest "normal" to label all of those languages, if not for the
implication of minimizing diversity within them. What is statistically
common may also not be "normal" in a conceptual sense, such as the fact
that statistically most languages are endangered today, so literally
normalizing that with a label seems inappropriate as well. Instead, the
status of endangerment also emphasizes that there is, for lack of better
phrasing, a sort of competition between larger and smaller languages. So
would "globalized" or "international" or "national" be appropriate labels
for most of what you're trying to describe? Especially with regard to
geography/space these labels would be relevant, as Maïa pointed out. Maybe
"large-scale" or something about cross-linguistically prestigious or
dominant (I'm not sure on exact phrasing for that one)? Are categories even
needed, if population size would be a good proxy? (I realize that
internationally absolute population sizes vary for minoritized languages,
so some sort of relative measurements in their local contexts might be
helpful, although I'm not sure how or whether it would make sense to
operationalize that.)

After all, what is exceptional is large languages: up to about 12,000 years
ago, with the introduction of agriculture in some places (then gradually
elsewhere), some individual languages started to have much larger
populations, but the average size for most languages has typically remained
around several thousand people, and that's still true today on average,
setting aside the mostly "WEIRD" outliers. (The members of this list
probably don't need a reference for this one, but I find the first chapter
of Tore Janson's 2002 book "Speak: A Short History of Languages" or the
2012 re-edition "The History of Languages: An Introduction" to be a good
foundation for this point, although the rest of the book focuses on mostly
European languages, colonization and globalization, in his terms "large
languages", "national languages" and "colonial languages".)

By the way, as an aside but to address an earlier question, as an American
(of European descent) [not that I necessarily speak for others], I have no
objection to using "European" at least for languages, and also especially
for coextensive cultures too (e.g. English speakers outside of Europe,
since that's often how linguistic studies are organized). The term
"Western" makes less sense, its only advantage being that it is traditional
in scholarship, but following from the viewpoints we're trying to move away
from. Note also that I just used "traditional" in a
Western/European/academic context, so this label is also confusing, as
others have pointed out. If you mean "European" or "Western" (or even
"traditional") as they have been previously used in scholarship, go ahead
and use them because they will be understood. But if you mean to question
them, then I'd suggest questioning the categories rather than just changing
the labels for those categories. Even if nearly coextensive with those
labels, that would be an improvement if there is a transparent reason for
the categorization rather than maintaining familiar assumptions. Some of
your phrase-length labels, Juergen, were clear in this way, which you could
use to define your terms (e.g. shorthand as "European" or otherwise, as you
wish).

Personally if I had to choose a label at the moment I'd probably use
"minoritized" specifically because it is vague and can include multiple
types of marginalization (possibly but not necessarily with similar
effects), assuming there is an assumed causal relationship, or perhaps the
other way around as "globalized" (etc.) ?. If not, I'd probably try to
avoid the labels by seeing whether population size could be used instead.
But the research design I imagine might differ from yours, so as others
have pointed out I think it's crucial to consider the specific research
questions for selecting the best categories and terminology, especially
when there isn't yet a consensus in the field. One other suggestion is to
avoid labeling the "other" group, and simply compare the exceptional, i.e.
WEIRD, languages to all languages on average.

Finally, I'm also concerned about the proliferation of idiosyncratic
terminology in different studies (from technical grammatical terms to
cultural labels), such that attempts to fix a terminology problem just
introduce more competing terms that aren't adopted by others. For cultural
perspectives and academia in general, are these not interdisciplinary
questions? Specifically from the perspective of Linguistics, it seems that
focus on languages could be one way to use more objective and applicable
terminology, such as "European" or population size, etc. (Rather than
"Western" or "traditional", etc.) Regardless, if the correlations are
strong enough to be informative, I would hope that they'd remain so
regardless of the margins of error of different terminology. There are
various problems with using number of speakers as a metric, for example,
but if the goal is to show a difference between "large" and "small" groups,
and that "smaller" languages are grammatically distinct, it seems to me
that the burden of proof should require a robust result that is clear even
with approximately categorized languages, given that this conversation has
demonstrated that we as an academic community can't agree on more precise
categories.

Daniel Ross
Lecturer of Linguistics
University of California, Riverside

On Sun, Jun 1, 2025 at 10:26 PM PONSONNET Maia via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
>
> If the criterial observation is about space, perhaps this could be the
> source for the label ?
>
> Allocentric-frame cultures and intrisic-frame cultures ?
>
>
> I understand one may want to generalize about clusters of properties or
> "profiles" matching these observations, but can we? Doesn't a lot of the
> work on space also points out to the importance of individual
> experience etc. ?
>
>
> I am not super familiar with the Causlity across Cultures work (will take
> a look), but this reminds me a bit of the dividual/individual contrast,
> which are highly influenced by the posture of the observer in my opinion?
>
>
> Tongue in cheek:
>
> What about low-symbolism colors?
>
> E.g. pink vs yellow cultures?
>
> This would also convey the notion that this is not a sharp divide ?  (eg
> orangé cultures)
>
>
> Cheers and best wishes for a nice week,
>
> Maïa
>
>
>
>
> Maïa Ponsonnet
>
> Chargée de Recherche HDR @ CNRS Dynamique Du Langage
>
> 14, avenue Berthelot, 69007 Lyon, FRANCE  -- +33 4 72 72 65 46
>
> Adjunct @ University of Western Australia
>
> + + + + +
>
> Membre du Comité d'Ethique de la Recherche, Université de Lyon
>
>
> <https://www.universite-lyon.fr/recherche/comite-d-ethique-de-la-recherche/comite-d-ethique-de-la-recherche-245561.kjsp>
> https://tinyurl.com/cerunivdelyon
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *De :* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> de la part de
> Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Envoyé :* lundi 2 juin 2025 06:19
> *À :* Jocelyn Aznar; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Objet :* Re: [Lingtyp] Two terminological quandaries for the price of
> one: 'traditional' and 'non-Western' cultures
>
>
> Dear Jocelyn – Yes, I can see that. (I received the same question off-list
> from Dan Slobin.)
>
>
>
> The two concepts are relevant to distinct projects, so I’ll discuss them
> again separately.
>
>
>
> A central finding of the MesoSpace project is that preferences for
> relative reference frames (in both language and nonverbal cognition) have
> only been attested in large-scale post-industrial societies.* The question
> is, how do I refer to the complement set of populations, the one for which
> existing quantitative studies have found a prevalence of allocentric frames?
>
>
>
> (* – Recently, an interesting partial exception to this generalization has
> surfaced: Ogelo & Bylund 2024 report that Dholuo speakers prefer intrinsic
> frames for featured grounds (grounds with distinctive parts that permit the
> assignment intrinsic ‘front’/‘back’/‘side’ terms), but relative frames for
> unfeatured grounds. This is to my knowledge the first such study that has
> systematically compared frame use with featured and unfeatured grounds. We
> do know from previous work (Levinson 1994; Levy 1994) that even populations
> with a clear geocentric bias rely on relative frames for meronym assignment
> to unfeatured grounds (conversely, no communities have ever been attested
> in which meronym assignment is done geocentrically).
>
>
>
> Meanwhile, the Causality Across Languages
> <https://causalityacrosslanguages.wordpress.com/> project has interfaced
> with a research tradition in Social Psychology that contrasts
> ‘sociocentric’ and ‘egocentric’ concepts of personhood. (The claim of
> interest is that the nexus b/w causal attribution and intentionality is
> culture-specific, and at the very least weaker in sociocentric communities
> than in egocentric ones.) The problem for me is that in this tradition, it
> is often tacitly or explicitly assumed that ‘Western’ cultures are
> ‘egocentric’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures ‘sociocentric.’ Consider for
> example Foley (1997: 266) (with apologies to Bill Foley, whose excellent
> book I’ve used for 20 years to teach Ling Anth):
>
>
>
> “The egocentric individualist concept of the person in Western culture is
> in marked contrast to that of many traditional cultures. These cultures
> have a sociocentric, context dependent conception of personhood (Shweder
> and Bourne 1984).”
>
>
>
> (As a bonus, in this quote we also get the further equation of
> ‘non-Western’ with ‘traditional’.)
>
>
>
> But even if I want to criticize such equations (if only as empirically at
> best premature), it seems that I have to find a way of talking about the
> types of cultural communities involved.
>
>
>
> Thanks! – Juergen
>
>
>
> Foley, W. A. (1997). *Anthropological linguistics: An introduction*.
> Malden, MA: Blackwell.
>
>
>
> Levinson, S. C. (1994). Vision, shape, and linguistic description: Tzeltal
> body-part terminology and object description. In S. C. Levinson & J. B.
> Haviland (eds.), *Space in Mayan languages. Special issue of*
> *Linguistics* 32 (4): 791-856.
>
>
>
> Levy, P. (1994). *How shape becomes grammar: On the semantics of part
> morphemes in Totonac*. Working Paper 29, Cognitive Anthropology Research
> Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
>
>
>
> Ogelo, A. & E. Bylund. (2024). Spatial frames of reference in Dholuo. *Language
> Sciences* (104). *https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101614
> <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101614>*
>
>
>
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585
> 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
> --
>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
> Jocelyn Aznar via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Date: *Friday, May 30, 2025 at 17:12
> *To: *lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >
> *Subject: *Re: [Lingtyp] Two terminological quandaries for the price of
> one: 'traditional' and 'non-Western' cultures
>
> Dear everyone,
>
> Somehow, it seems to me that the issue is to try to subsume societies
> with different situations and histories into one category, an endeavor
> that can only lead to either misrepresent many societies, or not really
> tell anything interesting. So I don't see any "one solution for every
> situation", as many terms mentioned previously in this discussion can be
> relevant depending on the specific interrogation/research question at hand.
>
> But perhaps the question should be more about the context associated
> with this inquiry? Is there a research question, or at least some more
> context, associated with this terminological issue? Maybe then can we
> suggest terms that could represent and distinguish properly the
> societies/communities in this given context.
>
> Best,
> Jocelyn
>
> Le 30/05/2025 à 18:54, Martin Haspelmath via Lingtyp a écrit :
> > I have encountered a similar problem, when trying to talk about "non-
> > LOL" (or "non-WISPy") languages, where I have sometimes used the label
> > "small languages".
> >
> > This does not sound very good, but "minor(ity) languages" is much worse,
> > I think, because many minority languages are not small at all (e.g.
> > Catalan in Spain, or Tatar in Russia, or Spanish in the US). Moreover,
> > there seems to have been a general shift to "minoritized languages",
> > which has additional overtones.
> >
> > For languages, "traditional" does not work at all, because all languages
> > have a tradition. For societies, it may work, but it has an association
> > with "non-industrialized", "marginalized" and "poor".
> >
> > However, I really didn't understand what Juegen was getting at – because
> > in Asia and Africa, there are big industrialized societies which are not
> > of European descent.
> >
> > But if we are looking for a term for "small-scale [indigenous]
> > communities practicing predominantly non-industrial (or pre-industrial)
> > modes of production in non-urban settings", why not simply say "small-
> > scale societies"? It seems that industrialized and urban societies would
> > never be considered small-scale, and Western countries hardly include
> > such societies, so maybe we can simply talk about "small-scale
> > societies"? (Most of these speak "small languages", but there are some
> > "small languages" spoken in urban/industrial settings.)
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > On 30.05.25 03:40, Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp wrote:
> >>
> >> Dear all – I really need your help with this! I’ve been struggling for
> >> quite some time now with the terms ‘traditional culture/society’ and
> >> ‘(non-)Western culture/society’. Both concepts play significant roles
> >> in my work, but both labels seem problematic. I’m looking for better
> >> alternatives. (If you want to call this query an exercise in political
> >> correctness, I would plead guilty to the charge. I do try to avoid
> >> offending people unintentionally.)
> >>
> >> Let me briefly try to explicate the concepts that I have been using
> >> these labels for:
> >>
> >> ‘Traditional cultures/societies’: Small-scale indigenous communities
> >> practicing predominantly non-industrial (or pre-industrial) modes of
> >> production in non-urban settings. By ‘small-scale’, I mean that
> >> stratification is predominantly in terms of age and gender, division
> >> of labor is low, and offices of power are largely non-hereditary. By
> >> ‘indigenous’, I mean pragmatically that the presence of the community
> >> in the area they inhabit is not an immediate result of European
> >> colonization. And the concept needs to be flexible enough to allow for
> >> the fact that the overwhelming majority of such communities are part
> >> of larger majority societies, are in more or less intensive contact
> >> with them, are under pressure by them, etc.
> >>
> >> I suspect that objections to the label ‘traditional’ may be the result
> >> of associating that label with Social Darwinism. At the same time, I
> >> find the label acceptable to the extent that one accepts that modes of
> >> production, while not following a strict developmental sequence, are
> >> not distributed randomly throughout human history either, particularly
> >> in the sense that industrialization did not take place prior to the
> >> Industrial Revolution. So what I’m looking for is a label that
> >> occupies the sweet spot between Social Darwinism and completely
> >> ahistoric and non-evolutionary perspectives of social organization.
> >>
> >> The sexiest currently available alternative to ‘traditional’ is ‘non-
> >> WEIRD’, in the Heinrich-et-al.-(2010) sense of ‘WEIRD’ (Western
> >> educated industrialized rich democratic). I don’t personally mind
> >> using that term, but it is awfully vague. There are many developing
> >> nations that I would not consider WEIRD (they may check neither of the
> >> five definitional properties), but that do not globally fit the
> >> ‘traditional’ concept either.
> >>
> >> ‘(Non-)Western cultures/societies’: By this I mean any cultures/
> >> societies of (non-)European origin/descent. The problem with the label
> >> ‘Western’ is the very misleading geographic association with the
> >> Western hemisphere: the vast majority of Europe isn’t even part of the
> >> Western hemisphere, and there are ‘Western’ societies (societies of
> >> European descent) outside Europe **and** outside the Western
> >> hemisphere, **and** of course there are many ‘non-Western’ cultures in
> >> the Western hemisphere. I’m well aware that the etymology of this use
> >> of ‘Western’ has little to do with the model of the geographic
> >> hemispheres, but my sense is that people make the association whether
> >> it belongs there or not – I know I do.
> >>
> >> I suspect the best solution to the second problem is to just talk
> >> about ‘cultures/societies of (non-)European origin/descent’. That’s a
> >> mouthful, but sooner or later somebody will coin a handy acronym. But
> >> I wanted to make sure I’m not missing anything.
> >>
> >> Anyway, many thanks in advance for your help! – Juergen
> >>
> >> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> >> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> >> University at Buffalo
> >>
> >> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> >> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> >> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> >> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> >> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu <mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu <jb77 at buffalo.edu>>
> >> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/ <http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/
> >> ~jb77/>
> >>
> >> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID
> >> 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
> >>
> >> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> >> (Leonard Cohen)
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Lingtyp mailing list
> >> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >>
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