Culinary language as cultural practice: An anthropological linguistic comparison of Indonesian and French food
Main Article Content
Abstract
This study examines culinary language in Indonesian and French culinary traditions as a reflection of cultural values, social norms, and ideological orientations through the analysis of food naming practices. This study departs from an anthropological linguistic perspective. This study used a qualitative method. The data were collected from restaurant menus, traditional culinary documentation, and official gastronomic sources in Indonesia and France. The findings reveal distinct ideological orientations reflected in culinary language across the two traditions. Indonesian culinary language tends to exhibit transparent and functional naming patterns that directly reference ingredients or cooking techniques, reflecting pragmatic cultural values, communal interaction, and social accessibility. In contrast, French culinary language demonstrates higher symbolic complexity and strong institutional connections through gastronomic heritage and territorial identity, particularly reinforced by regulatory systems such as Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) and Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP). This study contributes to anthropological linguistics by conceptualizing culinary naming as an everyday symbolic practice through which cultural values, social identities, and ideological meanings are reproduced. By providing a comparative perspective on Indonesian and French culinary discourse, the research highlights culinary language as an important semiotic domain for understanding the intersection of language, culture, and social structure in a global context.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
How to Cite
Share
References
Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press.
Ahearn, L. M. (2017). Living language: An introduction to linguistic anthropology (2nd ed). Wiley-Blackwell.
Blommaert, J. (2020). Durkheim and the internet: On sociolinguistics and the sociological imagination. Bloomsbury.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.
Cavanaugh, J. R., & Riley, K. C. (2023). Language and Food. In A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (1st ed., pp. 461–476). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119780830.ch25
Counihan, C., & Van Esterik, P. (2013). Food and culture: A reader (3rd ed). Routledge.
Danesi, M. (2018). The semiotics of food. Bloomsbury.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, P. P. (2014). Word of mouth: What we talk about when we talk about food. University of California Press.
Goody, J. (2013). Cooking, cuisine and class: A study in comparative sociology. Cambridge University Press.
Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2015). Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape (2nd ed). Routledge.
Kroskrity, P. V. (2010). Language ideologies: Evolving perspectives (J. Jaspers, J.-O. Östman, J. Verschueren). John Benjamins.
Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd Edition) (3rd ed., Vol. 4). SAGE Publications Inc.
Mintz, S. W., & Du Bois, C. M. (2002). The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1), 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.032702.131011
Parasecoli, F. (2017). Knowing where it comes from: Labeling traditional foods to compete in a global market. University of Iowa Press.
Parasecoli, F. (2022). Gastronativism: Food, identity, politics. Columbia University Press.
Paxson, H. (2009). The life of cheese: Crafting food and value in America (Expanded ed). University of California Press.
Riley, K. C., & Cavanaugh, J. R. (2017). Food and language: Discourses of identity and cultural meaning. Routledge.
Riley, K. C., & Paugh, A. L. (2018). Food and Language: Discourses and Foodways across Cultures (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315695235
Sibarani, R., Kimura, T., & Simanjuntak, P. (2025). The schematic structure of folk discourses of Toba Caldera Geosites as the collective memory for tourist destinations at lake Toba area. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1), 2451491. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2025.2451491
Sibarani, R., Nababan, M., Wahyudi, W., Simatupang, D. E., & Octavianna, Y. (2024). Speech performance in language teaching-learning: Culturally textual and non-textual landscapes of Toba Caldera Geosites. Studies in English Language and Education, 11(3), 1729–1747. https://doi.org/10.24815/siele.v11i3.35003
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 193–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2