Language, Culture and Activity: A Contrastive Study of Colloquial Bulgarian and Swedish

Spoken language is fundamental for human cognition and for the development of the human brain and human society yet it is not as rigorously studied as language struc-ture. One of the reasons is the difficulty of combining qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis in longitudinal studies based on authentic multimodal interaction data. The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-activity linguistic differences and similarities of spoken Bulgarian and Swedish and to propose methods for analysis of the relation between activity, culture and language in spoken language interaction. The results of this empirical study show that activity type has strongest impact on face-to-face spoken language interaction. The article presents hybrid qualitative-quantitative methods and sixteen measures for cross-linguistic cross-activity spoken language analysis.