Cultural divide or unifying factor? Humorous talk in the interaction of bilingual, cross-cultural couples

The essay sets out to explore a positive aspect of bilingual cross-cultural couples in long term relationships, namely the occurence of what is considered to be a harmonious factor: humor. The results of a purpose built questionnaire completed by 59 couples sheds light on a series of socio and psycholinguistic aspects of their daily relationship icluding language choice and attitudes in the domain of the couples' ludic interaction, such as when they joke with each other verbally nad theor use of humorous talk. The essay reports the findings of the processed data that emerged from the questionnaires as wella s qualitative data deriving from a series of semi-structured interviews.