Phraseology and Culture in English

1. Proverbs as traditional signs of cultural values 
Cultural and social historians, folklorists, linguists, and paremiologists have 
expended much energy in studying proverbs both as expressions of national 

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Wolfgang Mieder 
character and cultural worldview (see Mieder 1982, 1990, 1993, 2001; 
Mieder and Sobieski 2003). The former approach to proverbs has often 
resulted in proving a certain preconceived stereotypical view of a nation or 
an ethnic or social minority. It is relatively easy to put together small col-
lections of proverbs that will describe typical Poles or Spaniards in a light 
that would not necessarily be very flattering. Before and during Nazi Ger-
many, several books appeared that contained nothing but anti-Semitic 
proverbs at the exclusion of the many positive proverbs about the Jewish 
population (Mieder 1993: 225–255). Fortunately, there are also many stud-
ies that have looked at proverbs in a more balanced fashion, trying to ascer-
tain whether folklore in general and proverbs in particular do express “folk 
ideas”, “cultural axioms”, “essential postulates”, “worldview”, or a certain 
“mentality”, to use a term that has been applied to such investigations more 
recently. More than three decades ago folklorist Alan Dundes stated the 
task at hand quite clearly: 
What is important is the task of identifying the various underlying assump-
tions held by members of a given culture. All cultures have underlying as-
sumptions and it is these assumptions or folk ideas which are the building 
blocks of worldview. Any one worldview will be based upon many individ-
ual folk ideas and if one is seriously interested in studying worldview, one 
will need first to describe some of the folk ideas which contribute to the 
formation of that worldview. Sometimes, folk ideas may be articulated in a