The ‘cultural scripts’ approach refers to a technique for articulating culture-specific norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, precise, and accessible to cultural insiders and outsiders alike, which is free from Anglocentrism, and which lends itself to direct practical applications in intercultural communication and education. This result is possible because cultural scripts are formulated in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) of semantic primes, a highly constrained ‘mini-language’ of simple words and grammatical patterns which evidence suggests have equivalents in all languages. The technique emerged in the mid-1990s, growing out of ‘cross-over research’ between (cross-cultural) semantics and cross-cultural pragmatics. The main goal of the cultural scripts approach is to understand speech practices from the perspective of the speakers themselves. While not disregarding evidence from ethnography, sociological studies, literature, and so on, the cultural scripts approach accords particular importance to linguistic evidence.