Expressions of "Death" in Newspaper Obituaries: A Cultural comparison of Japanese and Bengali

Death remains a culturally sensitive and often taboo subject, with many languages exhibiting a reluctance to use the word directly. However, for death notices in newspapers the word, death or the verb, ‘to die’ is indispensable. Cultural norms as reflected in capturing this very linguistic choice thus makes an interesting study. This paper is an attempt to shed light on death euphemisms seen in newspaper obituaries and contrast the expressions for Japanese and Bengali language. It is a cross linguistic approach to understand the cultural underpinnings of how death is perceived and referred to. A corpus of 60 randomly selected obituaries from each language was analyzed to identify patterns of metaphorical mapping and cultural coping strategies embedded in language.