SACE Stage 2 Language and Culture cheat sheet

Register ranges from frozen (fixed ritual text) through formal, consultative, informal, to intimate; register is signalled by lexical choice, syntax, and address forms, not by topic alone.

Cohesion is achieved through reference (pronouns, demonstratives), substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical reiteration; cohesion is the surface network, coherence is the underlying logical unity perceived by the reader or listener.

A morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning; free morphemes stand alone (book), bound morphemes attach (un-, -s); derivational affixes change word class or meaning, inflectional affixes encode grammatical information such as tense, number, or case.

Phonemes are contrastive sound units established by minimal pairs (pin/bin); allophones are non-contrastive variants of one phoneme conditioned by environment; suprasegmentals include stress, pitch, intonation, and tempo.

Sentence functions are declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory; the mood of a clause is independent of its illocutionary force, so an interrogative form can perform a request (Could you close the door?).

Language change operates through lexical borrowing, semantic broadening, narrowing, amelioration, pejoration, and coinage; synchronic analysis describes a state of the language, diachronic analysis traces change over time.

Discourse markers (however, well, so, I mean) manage turn-taking, topic shift, and stance; in spoken data, features such as false starts, repairs, and backchannels are normal structural elements, not errors.

Politeness strategies divide into positive politeness (claiming common ground, compliments) and negative politeness (hedging, indirectness, apologising for imposition); power, social distance, and imposition rank determine strategy choice.

Text analysis procedure: identify field (topic and lexis), tenor (participants and relationship), and mode (channel and degree of planning), then link these to the register features actually present in the sample.

Hofstede's dimensions include power distance, individualism–collectivism, masculinity–femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence–restraint; each is a national tendency score, not a prediction about an individual.

Hall distinguishes high-context communication (meaning carried by setting, relationship, and shared history) from low-context communication (meaning carried explicitly in the code); the continuum describes tendencies, not fixed national essences.

Trompenaars' dimensions include universalism versus particularism (rule-based versus relationship-based obligation) and achievement versus ascription (status earned by performance versus attributed by age, birth, or role).

Face-threatening acts damage the hearer's positive face (desire for approval) or negative face (desire for autonomy); redressive strategies include hedging, indirectness, deference, and joking.

Ethnocentrism judges other groups by one's own norms as the standard; cultural relativism interprets practices within their own context; neither position requires abandoning ethical judgement, but both require suspending automatic evaluation.

Acculturation models (for example Berry's) plot heritage-culture maintenance against host-culture contact, yielding integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation; integration generally correlates with the best adaptation outcomes.

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: the strong version (linguistic determinism) claims language fixes thought; the weak version (linguistic relativity) claims language influences habitual attention and categorisation, and only the weak version has empirical support.

Translation and interpreting choices include domestication (adapting to the target audience) and foreignisation (retaining source-culture markers); equivalence can be formal, dynamic, or functional, and full equivalence is often unattainable.

A taboo or politeness norm in one culture may be neutral in another; address terms (T/V distinction, kinship terms, titles) encode relative status and intimacy and are frequent sites of intercultural miscommunication.

Lexical cohesion includes repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation; grammatical cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction.

Transitivity analysis identifies participant roles (actor, goal, sensor, sayer) and process types (material, mental, verbal, relational); passive voice backgrounds the actor and foregrounds the goal.

Modality may be epistemic (degrees of certainty: may, must) or deontic (degrees of obligation: must, should); modal choice signals stance and is a frequent marker of register and authority.

Code-switching can be inter-sentential, intra-sentential, or tag-switching; it performs identity, solidarity, topic management, or lexical gap-filling functions rather than indicating confusion.

Standardisation involves selection, codification, elaboration of function, and acceptance; a dialect is a regional or social variety with systematic rules, and the standard variety is a prestige choice, not a linguistically superior one.

Pragmatics distinguishes what is said from what is implicated; Grice's cooperative principle yields implicature when a maxim of quantity, quality, relation, or manner is deliberately flouted.

Word formation processes include compounding, blending, clipping, acronymy, conversion, back-formation, and borrowing; each produces new lexemes by a describable mechanism.

Analytical method: transcribe or quote a short excerpt, label features at phonological, lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels, then interpret how those features construct the text's purpose and audience.

Cultural dimensions describe statistical tendencies of a population; applying a dimension score to an individual is an ecological fallacy and a common analytical error.

Time orientation differs between monochronic (scheduling, punctuality, task focus) and polychronic (overlapping tasks, relationship focus) patterns; neither is deficient, and each shapes meeting behaviour.

High-context and low-context are ends of one continuum; most communication is mid-context, and the same speaker may shift context level with topic or interlocutor.

Intercultural communicative competence models combine attitudes (curiosity, openness), knowledge (of self and other), and skills (interpreting, relating, discovering); awareness of one's own culture is the starting point.

Stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination form a sequence from generalised belief to affective attitude to behaviour; generalisations are provisional and revisable, while stereotypes are rigid and resistant to counter-evidence.

Cultural values may be expressed indirectly through language, such as avoidance of explicit refusal, use of silence, honorifics, and indirect requests; reading these signals requires knowledge of the local norms.

Linguistic landscape analysis treats public signs as evidence of language policy, power relations, and identity; the presence, size, and placement of languages on signage index relative status.

Language policy can be assimilationist (one official language), pluralist (multiple official languages), or protectionist (support for minority languages); each choice carries consequences for education and identity.

When analysing an intercultural exchange, separate description (what was said or done), interpretation (what it likely meant locally), and evaluation (whether it succeeded), and support each with specific evidence from the exchange.

Phonological processes include assimilation (sounds becoming more alike), elision (sound omission), insertion, and reduction; connected speech differs systematically from citation forms.

A syllable has an onset, nucleus, and coda; stress placement can be lexical (distinguishing nouns from verbs, as in REcord/recORD) or prosodic, marking information focus.

Morphological typology classifies languages as isolating (little inflection), agglutinative (chained distinct affixes), fusional (combined meanings in one affix), or polysynthetic (many morphemes per word).

Word order typology pairs verb–object order with preposition use and noun–adjective order; SOV languages typically use postpositions, while SVO languages typically use prepositions.

A pidgin is a contact language with reduced structure and no native speakers; a creole arises when a pidgin is acquired natively and expands; a lingua franca is a shared contact language among speakers of different first languages.

Prescriptive rules state how a variety ought to be used; descriptive statements record how it is used; the split infinitive and sentence-final preposition are prescriptive prohibitions without descriptive justification.

Semantic relations include hyponymy (kind of), meronymy (part of), homonymy (unrelated meanings, same form), polysemy (related meanings, same form), and antonymy (gradable, complementary, or relational).

Identity is multiple and shifting across contexts; a person may foreground ethnic, national, professional, or gendered identity depending on audience and purpose, and language choice is one resource for doing so.

Accommodation theory: convergence (adjusting toward the interlocutor's speech) signals solidarity, while divergence (maintaining or exaggerating difference) signals distance or distinctiveness.

Interpreting and translating require handling culture-specific items; strategies include borrowing, calque, paraphrase, cultural substitution, and omission, each with trade-offs in fidelity and readability.

Cultural keywords are terms with dense, culture-specific meaning that resist one-word translation; analysing their collocations and connotations reveals underlying values.

Facework differs across cultures: some prefer direct redress, others prefer hinting or silence; misjudging the preferred strategy can cause offence even when intentions are good.

Ethnographic method involves observation, field notes, and participant accounts; conclusions should be treated as provisional and triangulated across more than one source.

Globalisation drives both homogenisation (spread of dominant languages and formats) and heterogenisation (local adaptation and hybrid forms); glocalisation names the blending of global and local.

A defensible intercultural claim cites specific linguistic evidence, avoids essentialising a whole culture from one instance, and acknowledges alternative interpretations of the same behaviour.

Reference types: anaphora points backward (he, that), cataphora points forward, exophora points outside the text; endophoric reference is what holds a text together internally.

Theme is the clause element placed first and treated as the point of departure; rheme is the remainder; thematic progression patterns (constant, linear, derived) describe how topics thread through a text.

Given–new information structure places familiar content early and new or focused content late; cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions move material into focus position.

Deixis encodes context dependence through person (I, you), place (here, there), and time (now, then); deictic expressions cannot be interpreted without knowing the speaking situation.

Speech act theory separates locution (the utterance), illocution (the intended act, such as promising or warning), and perlocution (the effect on the hearer); felicity conditions determine whether an act succeeds.

Language varieties include dialect (regional or social), sociolect (social group), idiolect (individual), and ethnolect; accent refers only to pronunciation, while dialect covers lexis, grammar, and pronunciation.

Prescriptivism versus descriptivism is a stance distinction, not a correctness distinction; standard and non-standard varieties are each internally rule-governed systems.

Cultural relativism as an analytical stance means suspending judgement long enough to understand a practice in its own terms; it does not require endorsing practices that violate widely held ethical standards.

Directness varies along a continuum; high-directness cultures value explicit clarity, while high-indirectness cultures value implicature and preserved harmony, and both encode this in routine formulae.

Honorific systems (for example address by title, kinship term, or pronoun choice) grammaticalise social relationships; errors in honorific use are often judged more harshly than grammatical errors.

Nonverbal channels include proxemics (space), kinesics (body movement), haptics (touch), oculesics (eye contact), and chronemics (time use); norms for each vary and are frequently misread across cultures.

Language shift and language death follow from domain loss: when a language stops being used in education, media, or public life, intergenerational transmission typically declines.

Revitalisation strategies include immersion education, official status, media production, and documentation; success depends on domains of use and community control, not documentation alone.

Analysing a cultural artefact requires stating its origin, its function for its community, and the values it indexes, then distinguishing the insider meaning from an outsider interpretation.

Vowel and consonant inventories differ across languages; phonotactic constraints govern permissible clusters, so loanwords are adapted to fit the borrowing language's syllable structure.

Intonation performs grammatical, attitudinal, and discourse functions: it can distinguish statement from question, signal stance, and mark information structure or turn completion.

Grammatical categories vary: some languages mark evidentiality (source of knowledge) obligatorily, some mark grammatical gender, and some mark aspect rather than tense; absence of a category in one language is not a deficiency.

Corpus evidence supports frequency claims; collocation strength is measured by co-occurrence statistics, and high-frequency collocations are processed faster than novel combinations.

Language and power: nominalisation, passive voice, and agent deletion can obscure responsibility; critical discourse analysis examines how such choices naturalise particular viewpoints.

Children's acquisition proceeds through babbling, one-word, two-word, and telegraphic stages; overgeneralisation errors (goed, foots) show rule learning rather than imitation.

Bilingual development can be simultaneous (two first languages from birth) or sequential; code-mixing in young bilinguals is rule-governed, not evidence of confusion.

Cultural dimensions are heuristic tools for generating hypotheses about behaviour, not explanations to be asserted without evidence from the specific interaction or text.

Face and politeness analysis requires identifying the imposition, the relative power, and the social distance, because the same utterance can be polite in one configuration and rude in another.

Translation of humour, irony, and taboo terms tests equivalence limits; a literal rendering may be accurate lexically yet fail pragmatically, so functional equivalence may be preferred.

Intercultural conflict often arises from mismatched expectations about directness, turn-taking, silence, or formality rather than from lexical ignorance; diagnosing the level of mismatch guides the analysis.

Language attitudes are measurable through matched-guise and questionnaire methods; listeners often rate standard-accented speakers higher on competence and non-standard on solidarity.

Multilingual identities are performed through code choice, accent maintenance, and lexical borrowing; choosing one language over another in a given setting is itself a meaningful act.

A strong intercultural analysis names the specific linguistic feature, states the local norm it indexes, and offers at least one alternative reading before committing to an interpretation.

Syntactic constituents can be tested by substitution, movement, and coordination; a string that passes these tests behaves as a unit, which supports hierarchical rather than linear structure.

Clause combining includes coordination (parataxis) and subordination (hypotaxis); subordination types include relative, adverbial, and complement clauses, each with distinct functions.

Voice and valency: intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive clauses differ in the number of arguments; passivisation and antipassive constructions change which argument is foregrounded.

Aspect (perfective, imperfective, progressive) describes internal temporal structure, while tense locates events in time; languages differ in which category is grammaticalised.

Mood covers indicative, imperative, and subjunctive or irrealis; counterfactual conditionals require irrealis marking in many languages and are a common source of learner error.

Semantic change pathways include metaphor, metonymy, and subjectification; the same pathway can be traced across unrelated languages, which supports general cognitive mechanisms.

Orthography may be alphabetic, syllabic, logographic, or a mix; writing system choice affects literacy acquisition and is sometimes a matter of political contestation.

Intercultural competence assessment distinguishes knowledge, attitudes, and skills; a high knowledge score does not imply high behavioural skill, and evidence should be matched to the component claimed.

Cultural adaptation follows a U-curve pattern of honeymoon, crisis, recovery, and adjustment; the curve is an idealisation, and individual trajectories vary widely.

Third-culture and hybrid identities emerge when individuals move between cultural systems; they may report belonging fully to neither and comfortably to both, which undermines single-category assumptions.

Language ideologies are beliefs about which varieties are correct, beautiful, or valuable; these beliefs shape policy, education, and hiring even when linguistically unfounded.

Indigenous and minority language rights are framed in international instruments as rights to use, maintain, and transmit one's language; implementation depends on national law and resourcing.

Reading a translated text critically means asking who translated it, for which audience, and which source features were lost, added, or domesticated in the process.

When comparing cultural practices, use parallel evidence from each culture rather than a norm from one culture applied to the other; asymmetry of evidence is the most common flaw in comparative analysis.

Morphological analysis procedure: segment the word, label each morpheme as root, derivational, or inflectional, then state the word class and meaning contributed by each affix.

Phonological transcription conventions distinguish broad (phonemic, slashes) from narrow (phonetic, brackets) transcription; the choice depends on whether contrast or detail is the analytical target.

Lexical fields group words by shared semantic domain; componential analysis breaks meaning into features (for example human, adult, male) to show how near-synonyms differ.

Collocation is a habitual co-occurrence relation (strong tea, not powerful tea); collocational mismatch is a frequent marker of non-native production even when grammar is accurate.

Discourse structure varies by genre: narrative typically follows orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda, and genre-specific moves are analysable in written texts too.

Language contact outcomes include borrowing, calquing, pidginisation, and convergence; the direction of influence usually follows prestige and power rather than population size.

Evaluation in text is built through appraisal resources: attitude (affect, judgement, appreciation), engagement (hedging, attribution), and graduation (intensity); identifying these reveals stance.

Cultural schemas are background knowledge structures; a reader without the relevant schema may misread a text even when every word is understood, which is why glossing culture-specific references matters.

Intercultural pragmatics studies how politeness, implicature, and speech acts transfer across languages; pragmatic failure is often interpreted as rudeness rather than as a language gap.

Rapport management differs by culture: some value small talk and relational framing before tasks, others value task-first efficiency; mismatched framing can be read as coldness or as wasting time.

Language and nation are not coextensive: pluricentric languages have multiple standard centres, and many nations are multilingual, so equating one language with one culture is an error.

Cultural appropriation versus exchange debates turn on power, credit, and consent; an analysis should name the specific practice, its origin, and the power relation involved.

Media representations of other cultures often rely on binary contrasts (modern versus traditional); identifying the binary and the omitted middle ground is a standard critical move.

Evidence quality in intercultural claims: prefer observed instances with context over national generalisations, and state the limits of what a single example can support.

Syntactic ambiguity arises from structural attachment (old men and women) or from lexical category ambiguity; disambiguation relies on context, prosody, or plausibility.

Anaphora resolution depends on agreement, recency, semantic plausibility, and topic prominence; languages differ in whether null subjects are permitted, which affects how reference is tracked.

Politeness markers are grammaticalised in some languages through honorific verb forms, humble and respectful registers, and pronoun selection; these are obligatory rather than optional stylistic choices.

Language standardisation processes include dictionary publication, spelling reform, and school prescription; these raise the prestige of one variety and typically reduce tolerance for others.

Borrowing types include loanword (form and meaning), loan translation or calque (meaning only, morphemes translated), and loan shift (meaning extended under foreign influence).

Spoken and written modes differ in lexical density, syntactic complexity, and reliance on shared context; a transcript's apparent disfluency is an artefact of transcription as much as of speech.

High-context communication relies on shared history and setting, so a short utterance can carry a large message; low-context communication spells out meaning, so brevity can read as vagueness.

Power distance affects forms of address, turn allocation, and who may initiate disagreement; a direct challenge from a junior member may be read as incompetence or as insolence depending on the norm.

Uncertainty avoidance relates to tolerance for ambiguity; high-avoidance settings favour explicit rules and formal procedure, which can look rigid to low-avoidance observers.

Individualist and collectivist tendencies shape whether credit and blame are assigned to persons or to groups; attributions in a text can reveal which orientation the writer assumes.

Cultural keywords and untranslatable terms should be glossed with their connotations and typical collocations rather than given a single dictionary equivalent.

Intercultural mediation involves relaying meaning between parties, including explaining implicit norms; the mediator's neutrality and accountability are the central ethical questions.

Clause analysis order: identify the verb and its valency, then the arguments (subject, object, complement), then adjuncts of time, place, and manner; adjuncts are optional, complements are not.

Grammatical agreement may be controlled by semantic or grammatical features; collective nouns show variability across varieties (the team is/are), which is a variety marker rather than an error.

Negation can be clausal, constituent, or lexical; negative raising (I don't think he's coming) shifts the negative from the subordinate clause for pragmatic reasons.

Quantifiers and scope interact with negation to produce ambiguity (all that glitters is not gold); scope differences across languages explain some persistent learner errors.

Text cohesion can be measured informally by counting referring expressions and conjunctions per clause; high lexical density with low conjunction use is typical of formal written registers.

Language variation correlates with social factors including class, age, gender, and network density; variationist analysis reports frequencies by group rather than judging individual forms as right or wrong.

Cultural distance (difference in values, institutions, and language) affects adaptation difficulty; the construct is relational and depends on the direction of comparison.

Intercultural sensitivity develops from ethnocentric stages (denial, defence, minimisation) to ethnorelative stages (acceptance, adaptation, integration); the model describes a continuum, not a fixed type.

Translation ethics includes fidelity to the source, accountability to the audience, and disclosure of adaptation; withholding the fact of adaptation can misrepresent the source culture.

Speech act realisation differs systematically: refusals, apologies, and compliments follow culture-specific formulae, and direct transfer of first-language formulae often produces pragmatic failure.

Cultural memory and heritage language maintenance depend on transmission domains such as family, religious practice, community events, and media rather than on formal instruction alone.

Comparative analysis should state the tertium comparationis, the shared dimension against which two cultural items are compared, otherwise the comparison is ungrounded.

Phoneme inventories can be plotted on a vowel quadrilateral or consonant chart by place and manner; the chart makes systematic gaps and contrasts visible.

Semantic prosody describes the consistent positive or negative aura of a word across its collocates (cause typically collocates with negative outcomes); it is invisible in dictionary definitions.

Metaphor analysis identifies source and target domains (argument is war); metaphor is pervasive in ordinary language and shapes reasoning, not merely decoration.

Genre analysis describes typical move structures and their typical linguistic exponents; moves may be obligatory or optional, and their order can vary by discipline.

Pragmatic markers and discourse particles (well, you know, actually) carry procedural rather than conceptual meaning; they guide interpretation rather than adding content.

Language change is often led by young speakers and spreads through social networks; apparent-time studies infer change by comparing age groups in a single sample.

Cultural values are not uniformly shared within a group; intra-cultural variation can exceed inter-cultural variation, so group averages must be reported with their spread.

Face-saving strategies include giving options, using plural or impersonal forms, prefacing with apologies, and offering a face-saving reason for refusal.

Intercultural listening requires monitoring for mismatched expectations about silence length, overlap, and backchannelling; what reads as interruption in one norm reads as engagement in another.

Language planning has status planning (which language in which domain), corpus planning (standardisation, terminology), and acquisition planning (education); a policy usually combines all three.

Cultural translation problems are greatest for items with no target equivalent; the analyst should name the strategy used and assess the loss of connotation.

When interpreting an intercultural encounter, distinguish the speaker's intention, the hearer's inference, and the observer's judgement, and treat each as separate evidence.

Transitivity and agency: agentless passives and nominalisations remove the responsible party from the clause, a pattern frequent in bureaucratic and political texts.

Information packaging devices include fronting, inversion, clefting, and existential there-constructions; each foregrounds particular material without changing propositional content.

Lexical density is content words divided by total clauses; it rises in written academic prose and falls in conversation, and it is a reliable register indicator.

Grammaticalisation describes lexical items becoming grammatical morphemes over time (going to as a future marker); the pathway typically runs from concrete to abstract meaning.

Language universals and implicational hierarchies (for example accessibility for relativisation) predict which structures a language is likely to permit if it permits others.

Error analysis distinguishes interlingual transfer from intralingual overgeneralisation; identifying the source guides interpretation of learner output.

Cultural dimensions are measured at the level of national samples and should never be used to predict an individual's behaviour; that inference is an ecological fallacy.

Face-threatening acts vary in weight with power, distance, and imposition; the same request can be routine between peers and highly delicate across a status gap.

Translation equivalence types: formal (form and literal meaning), dynamic (equivalent effect on the target reader), and functional (equivalent purpose); the choice should be justified by the text's function.

Intercultural competence is demonstrated by behaviour, not by knowledge alone; evidence should come from observed interaction or from the learner's own reflective analysis of a specific instance.

Language attitudes research shows accent evaluation is socially motivated; judgements of correctness or pleasantness often track the prestige of the speakers rather than any linguistic property.

Ethical intercultural analysis avoids both essentialism (all members of a culture are alike) and relativism that excuses harm; it names the specific practice, its context, and the values in tension.

Morphophonemic alternations are regular changes to a morpheme's form in context (plural -s as /s/, /z/, /ɪz/); the conditioning environment predicts the variant.

Stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythm classes describe typical timing patterns; the classes are tendencies, and individual languages can fall between them.

Semantic roles (agent, patient, experiencer, instrument, location) are assigned independently of grammatical function, so a subject can be a patient in a passive clause.

A register analysis table with columns for field, tenor, mode, and supporting linguistic evidence is the standard way to structure an exam response on text analysis.

A language variety's prestige is a social judgement, not a linguistic property; all varieties are equally systematic and equally adequate for communication within their communities.

Contact-induced change can be structural as well as lexical; prolonged bilingualism may produce convergence in syntax or phonology, not only borrowed words.

Hofstede's dimensions describe national tendencies; the scores are population averages, and within-country variation is often larger than between-country differences.

Hall's high-context and low-context continuum concerns how much meaning is carried by the code versus the setting; it is a tendency, not a national essence.

Trompenaars' universalism–particularism dimension contrasts obligation to abstract rules with obligation to relationships; it predicts different responses to the same ethical dilemma.

Berry's acculturation framework crosses heritage-culture maintenance with host-culture contact to yield integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation.

The weak form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) claims language influences habitual thought; the strong determinist form is not supported by evidence.

Politeness theory distinguishes positive face (desire for approval) from negative face (desire for autonomy); redressive strategies are chosen according to power, distance, and imposition.

Ethnocentrism evaluates other cultures by one's own norms; cultural relativism interprets practices within their own context, and neither stance removes the need for evidence.

Cohesion is the explicit surface linking of clauses and sentences; coherence is the perceived logical unity, and a text can be cohesive yet incoherent, or coherent with little explicit linking.

Register is a configuration of field, tenor, and mode; a change in any one typically triggers adjustments in lexis, syntax, and address forms throughout the text.

Derivational affixes create new lexemes and may change word class; inflectional affixes mark grammatical categories such as tense, number, person, and case without creating a new lexeme.

Phonemes are contrastive units established by minimal pairs; allophones are contextually conditioned variants of a single phoneme and do not distinguish meaning.

Grice's cooperative principle comprises the maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner; deliberate flouting generates implicature rather than communicative failure.

Speech act theory separates locution, illocution, and perlocution; felicity conditions determine whether an illocutionary act such as promising or naming succeeds.

Prescriptivism states how a variety ought to be used; descriptivism records how it is used, and standard and non-standard varieties are each internally rule-governed.

Accommodation theory: convergence toward an interlocutor's speech signals solidarity, while divergence maintains or emphasises social distance and distinctiveness.

Cultural keywords carry dense culture-specific meaning and resist single-word translation; their collocations and connotations reveal underlying values.

Monochronic time orientation emphasises schedules and task focus; polychronic orientation emphasises relationships and overlapping activities, and neither is deficient.

Language shift follows domain loss; when a language ceases to be used in education, media, or public life, intergenerational transmission typically declines.

Revitalisation depends on restored domains of use and community control, not on documentation alone; immersion education and media production are common strategies.

Intercultural mediation requires relaying meaning and explaining implicit norms; neutrality and accountability to both parties are the central ethical questions.

A defensible intercultural claim cites specific linguistic evidence, avoids generalising a whole culture from one instance, and acknowledges alternative interpretations.