Women in the Multilingual Mind: University Students’ Cultural Models of Femininity in Hungarian L1 and English L2

This study examines how bilingual speakers conceptualize the culturally salient category woman in their first language (Hungarian) and second language (English), adopting a Cultural Linguistics framework. Drawing on notions of cultural schemas, categories, and metaphors, and informed by the emic–etic distinction, the study investigates whether language choice modulates access to culture-internal versus more generalized conceptual representations. Data were elicited through word association tasks administered to Hungarian university students in both languages. The analysis identifies shared conceptual patterns alongside systematic differences in salience, specificity, and emotional loading across languages. The findings suggest that bilingual conceptualization operates along an emic–etic continuum: Hungarian responses tend to activate culturally embedded, affectively rich schemas, while English responses favor more abstract and decontextualized representations. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of bilingual cultural cognition and language-modulated conceptualization.