CULTURE AND LANGUAGE - THE CASE OF CULTURAL DIMENSIONS AND PERSONAL PRONOUN USE

The relationship between culture and language was examined across 39 l anguages spoken in 71 cultures. Correlations were computed across lang uages and cultures between the use of first- and second-person singula r pronouns (e.g., ''I'' and ''you'') and global cultural dimensions su ch as Individualism, which were previously extracted in large-scale cr oss-cultural surveys. The personal pronouns were analyzed in terms of the number of first-and second-person singular pronouns and whether th e pronouns can be dropped when used as the subject of a sentence in sp eech. Cultures with pronoun drop languages tended to be less Individua listic than those with nonpronoun drop languages. The number of person al pronouns correlated with some cultural dimensions that reflected di fferent conceptions of the person. Personal deixis (person-indexing pr onouns) may provide a window through which cultural practices can be i nvestigated.