Modern Estonian culture and its effect on language use

Abstract

This study explored the effect of other-face-threat and cultural background on disclosure of positive information in situations requiring other-facework. Estonian, US and Vietnamese participants were tasked with choosing a lexical choice in scenarios which could include an explicit, possible or non-existent other-face-threat. We found that cultural background and scenarios had an effect on the lexical choice used, however no interaction between the two independent variables was found. Vietnamese participants answered with the lowest mean lexical choices across all scenarios, but showed a similar pattern of answers as the other cultures. Estonian participants’ answers were most similar to the US sample. Estonian youth showed high scores in independent self-construal and Hofstede’s individualism dimension, demonstrating individualism levels similar to the US sample.