emicadj.

1954 K. L. Pike Lang. in Rel. Human Behavior i. ii. 8/1 In contrast to the etic approach an emic one is in essence valid for only one language (or one culture) at a time..; it is an attempt to discover and to describe the pattern of that particular language or culture in reference to the way in which the various elements of that culture are related to each other in the functioning of that particular pattern, rather than an attempt to describe them in reference to a general classification derived in advance of the study of that particular culture.

1969 Eng. Stud. 50 586 One person will shake hands with you by lifting your hand up to about shoulder height and then drop it, another will move your hand less high and then down again, a third will ‘pump’ it up and down two or three times; in Western culture these may be called etic differences and can be viewed as various realizations of the one emic element: ‘shaking hands’.

1970 Language 46 78 An underbar is sometimes used to point up the correspondences between emic and etic transcriptions.

1962 Jrnl. Amer. Folklore 75 101 The distinction between the old minimal unit, the motif, and the new minimal unit, the function, may be seen very well in terms of Kenneth Pike's valuable distinction between the etic and the emic.

1993 D. Booth in F. J. Schuurman Beyond Impasse (2004) 64 The mutual indispensability of the ‘emic’ (description of cultural meanings) and the ‘etic’ (observation of behaviour) is well trodden terrain.

2007 N. Small et al. Living & Dying with Dementia v. 132 For Foucault neither the etic or the emic exist outside of the power structures of the prevailing discourse.