The term cultural cringe refers to a tendency to regard one’s own culture as inferior to that of another. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cultural Cringe”
I didn’t realize that there was an actual term for something that I’ve thought about from time to time.
It’s cultural cringe. Do you know this term?
Cultural cringe. I think I read something about it, but fill me in.
You probably did. It’s used in anthropology or sociology to refer to an internalized inferiority complex that causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior.
I think sometimes one’s hometown doesn’t really appreciate what one has done until they go off to another part of the world and make their name there, and then they come back, and then they’re legitimate.
I’m thinking we should call that a hometown wince, maybe.
Cultural cringe and hometown wince.
Cultural cringe that I know is from linguistics. It’s the way that people will denigrate their own language or their own dialect because they know that the outside world does.
And so they think of themselves and their family and their community as speaking a bad English rather than just a variant.
Yeah, I thought you’d bring up that example.
Yeah, the term cultural cringe originated in Australia and it was coined by a social commentator there in the 1950s.
But, yeah, it makes perfect sense that you would apply it to language as well.
Yeah, so when you have a chip on your shoulder about something that’s normal and natural.
Yeah.
