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The story of “Danish Happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics
Abstract
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of ”happiness”, but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural keyword
lykke
. The semantics of
lykke
is explicated along with two related concepts
livsglæde
, roughly, ‘life joy’ and
livslyst
‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of
lykke
-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.
... The Anglo-international discourse of 'the mind' is also in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. Not only does the Anglo English concept of 'the mind' not translate (directly) into European languages such as French, German, Danish, or Russian (Wierzbicka 1992(Wierzbicka , 2013Levisen 2012Levisen , 2014; recent studies in Japanese, Malay, Korean, and Thai personhood constructs have further questioned the Anglophone stronghold of 'the mind' (Hasada 2000;Goddard 2001Goddard , 2008Yoon 2006Yoon , 2008Svetanant 2013). 2 Wierzbicka (2013: 192) calls for an end to the absolutization of the Anglo mind and demonstrates how Anglo-specific concepts in general can become 'conceptual prisons' (see also Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014). We want to continue this attempt to dethrone 'absolutized categories' in Anglo English and to challenge the view that modern Anglo English concepts are representative of what it means to be 'human' . ...
... Below, we have replicated the most recent explication for the Anglo English mind from Wierzbicka (in press), with one minor adjustment based on the discussions in Goddard (2008) and Levisen (2014). ...
... Cross-European studies in cultural semantics and ethnopsychology (first wave) have shown that traditional European languages such as English, French, and Russian do not share a semantics of personhood, that concepts of a person in different ethnolinguistic communities reflect cultural history, and that personhood is fundamentally linguistic in nature (Wierzbicka 1989(Wierzbicka , 1992. Studies in East Asian personhood (second wave) have thrown further light on the extent of diversity in personhood constructs, and have allowed us to develop a semantic template through which we can study this diversity (Levisen 2014). Despite these insights and results, the mind is still unduly 'pan-humanized' by Anglophone academia. ...
In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct
mind
in Trinidadian creole
.
We analyze the lexical semantics of the word and explore the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. Our analysis demonstrates that the Anglo concept is a cognitively oriented construct with a semantic configuration based on ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’, whereas the Trinidadian
mind
is a moral concept configured around perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We further explore the Trinidadian moral discourse of
bad mind
and
good mind
, and articulate a set of cultural scripts for the cultural values linked with personhood in the Trinidadian context. Taking a postcolonial approach to the semantics of personhood, we critically engage with Anglo-international discourses of
the mind
, exposing the conceptual stranglehold of the colonial language (i.e., English) and its distorting semantic grip on global discourse. We argue that creole categories of values and personhood — such as the Trinidadian concept of
mind
— provide a new venue for critical
mind
studies as well as for new studies in creole semantics and cultural diversity.
... These scripts are very much in line with the meaning of happy formulated earlier. Levisen (2014) argues that in Danish culture, the meaning of lykke -the equivalent of happi-Tab. 5.5: Selected Anglo-American cultural scripts relating to expressing positive feelings (Wierzbicka 1999). ...
... when I say something to other people it is good if these people think that I feel something good "Cheerful" speech routines (Wierzbicka 1999: 247) many people think like this: it is good to say often something like this: "I feel something very good" many people think like this: (Wierzbicka 1999: 251) it is good to think often that something good will happen it is good to often feel something good because of this it is good if other people can see this many people think like this: (Wierzbicka 1999: 266) when I do something I want to know: "I do it because I want to do it not because of anything else" Tab. 5.6: Selected Danish cultural scripts (Levisen 2014). ...
Emotions are a multifaceted phenomenon. They are at the center of attention of different disciplines including psychology and linguistics. These two disciplines have the most direct access to emotions due to the nature of their research. For psychologists, emotions are states experienced by people on a regular basis. In contrast, linguists study words and expressions that people use to convey their emotions. Despite not being identical, these two foci of studies are closely related. Can the divide between these two disciplines be narrowed? Can the visions of emotions offered by these two disciplines be mutually enriched and possibly even merged? This chapter overviews leading linguistic approaches to studying emotions and then demonstrates their relevance to theories of emotions in psychology. Possible directions of mutual enhancement are discussed.
... Accordingly, happiness is defined for instance as life satisfaction and the presence of positive emotions (e.g., Capaldi et al., 2014;Diener, 1984). However, researchers have emphasized the need to study people's own experiences and definitions of happiness (e.g., Levisen, 2014). For instance, Scollon and King (2011, p. 13) argue that analyzing lay conceptions of happiness informs us about the sources and restrictions that people attach to ideas of happiness in their everyday life, and how people follow or avoid certain practices in their lives. ...
... People's personal experiences and definitions of happiness, as well as unhappiness, have played a marginal role in the research to date (see Capaldi et al., 2014). Even though processes related to happiness may have widely shared characteristics, several researchers have noted that happiness should not only be approached as a universal phenomenon, but its cultural meanings should also be taken into account (e.g., Carlquist et al., 2017;Levisen, 2014). Exploring adolescents' "bottom-up" conceptions for happiness and nature allows us to elaborate on the accuracy of the above-mentioned researcher-given "top-down" definitions of happiness, as well as the adolescents' (positive or negative) experiences in nature. ...
Contact with nature has been increasingly recognized as enhancing human well-being and health. Less is known about how people perceive and define the effects of nature in their everyday lives. This study examines conceptions of the relation between nature and happiness offered by 15- to 16-year-olds in Finland, which has been reported to be “the happiest country in the world.” The data consist of thematic writings (N = 184). The results show that most of the participants agreed that nature makes them happy or associated only positive characteristics with nature. One fourth of the participants had an ambivalent stance on the topic, while a small minority did not see any connection between happiness and nature. Happiness was connected to opportunities that nature offered for physical activity, and emotional and cognitive renewal. To prevent polarization in relation to nature, special efforts should be made to support outdoor recreation for adolescents.
... (and other Nordic countries, seeLevisen 2014) is the commonly held belief that while there are dialectal differences in Finnish, there are not class-based differences. 6 That is: while in GreatBritain, notably, there are established class-based distinctions with how English is spoken and perceived, similar views about class-based distinctions are not an overt part of the language ideology in Finland (see Mooney and Evans 2015; Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, and Toivanen 2019).This does not mean that distinctions relating to class do not exist (seePiippo, Vaattovaara, and Voutilainen 2016), it simply means they are not part of the overt ideologies in Finland.When it comes to English in Finland, the ideologies appear quite different from those held of Finnish. ...
An observation about pragmatic borrowing from English into various recipient languages is what has been termed "licensing", which, along with semantic bleaching and perceived positive politeness, has been advanced as a motivation for borrowing pragmatic forms from English (see Andersen 2014). In this chapter, the notion of licensing is explored further, drawing on observations from, for example, Matras ([2009] 2020). It has already been proposed that the borrowing of certain English-sourced linguistic items allows a speaker to engage in discourse behavior that is not seen as native (or possibly even appropriate) in the recipient culture or language (Peterson 2017). In this chapter I broaden the perspective of previous research to look at longer stretches of discourse and language choice, demonstrating that perceived ideologies about characteristics of English in native-speaker settings are driving mechanisms in how English is used in foreign language settings, in this case Finland.
... The ranking is based on scores across several different areas, including gross domestic product per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make one's own life choices, generosity of the general population, and perceptions of internal and external corruption levels (Helliwell et al., 2021). An interesting twist to the World Happiness Reports is the extent to which Anglo-centric notions of "happiness" map-or rather, don't map-onto to existing notions in the Nordic countries (Levisen, 2012(Levisen, , 2014. A range of reactions, from the academic to the journalistic (e.g., Savolainen, 2021) venture that "happiness" in the Nordic is more accurately described as being content with what one has, a concept that relates back to the overall tendencies described previously. ...
In the Nordic countries, widespread proficiency in English is positioned as a positive and even critical component of overall global competitiveness and competence. Indeed, maps illustrating who speaks the “best” English in Europe show a swath across the Nordic countries, and the number of people in the Nordic countries claiming proficiency in English is only a few percentage points below those in places such as the UK and Ireland. At the same time, the Nordic countries are routinely listed as the “happiest,” the most egalitarian, the most classless, least corrupt, and an epicenter for so-called “tender values.” In recent years, there has been a spate of publications highlighting how Nordic exceptionalism carries with it some unfortunate downsides, including the possibility for people to ignore or fail to acknowledge issues such as racism, sexism, and other social inequalities because of the affordance: “But our society is equal.” There is a parallel in the use of English. The entrenched notion that “everyone is good at English” overlooks that certain segments of the population—such as the elderly, immigrants and rural inhabitants—do not have the same level of access to the symbolic capital represented through facility in English. In this sense, the use of English presents social/class-based barriers that the national languages do not. This article offers a critique of the social realities relating to the use of English in the Nordic Countries within the context of the social welfare system and “Nordic exceptionalism,” focusing mostly on Finland. Making use of examples of discourse in newspapers, previous research and language policy documents, the chapter highlights how aspects of the use of English in Finland parallel other potentially hyped yet unequitable social issues.
... The ranking is based on scores across several different areas, including gross domestic product per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make one's own life choices, generosity of the general population, and perceptions of internal and external corruption levels (Helliwell et al., 2021). An interesting twist to the World Happiness Reports is the extent to which Anglo-centric notions of "happiness" map-or rather, don't map-onto to existing notions in the Nordic countries (Levisen, 2012(Levisen, , 2014. A range of reactions, from the academic to the journalistic (e.g., Savolainen, 2021) venture that "happiness" in the Nordic is more accurately described as being content with what one has, a concept that relates back to the overall tendencies described previously. ...
The global spread of English, manifest in multiple Englishes around the world, and its role as a global language continue to be dynamically evolving areas of investigation. A range of studies have emerged along related strands of research concerned with the global spread and creation of Englishes (World Englishes); the use of English as an additional language, international language, and lingua franca; and the functions of English as the language of globalization mediating global cultural flows. An explicit and implicit corollary of the global spread of English is the contact that Englishes have with other languages and the influences that emerge from this contact.
This Research Topic aims at foregrounding the effects that surface from the interplay of Englishes with other languages. The interaction scenarios may differ widely, ranging from remote language contact (e.g. English influence being mediated) to the presence of English in everyday multilingual practices - both individually (as emerging from multilingual minds) and socially (e.g. English impacting on the communal use of other languages). By showcasing current research that investigates different contexts in which Englishes interact with other languages, this Research Topic aims at furthering our understanding of the processes of language contact and multilingualism in various domains of language use, including their social implications for speakers of Englishes and other languages.
... Recently, there has been a critique of approaches to happiness which make it into a universal matter, recognizing that "cultural variations on happiness are considerable" (Stearns 2012b: 104; see also Levisen 2014;Wierzbicka 2010). Ashley Frawley (2015: 63f) suggests that any universal idea of happiness is troublesome, as it involves a kind of unchanging essence, rather than being a relational and changing matter. ...
This book provides an ethnographic contribution to research on children’s consumption, family life and happiness. Various and shifting notions of happiness are explored, as well as conditions for and challenges to happiness, through an analysis of video-recorded interviews and mobile ethnography conducted in two of the most popular theme parks in Sweden. Initially, the study outlines how previous research has conceptualized happiness in association with time and place in a rather static way. Based on a treatise of notions of happiness in philosophy and the social sciences, there is a turn in this thesis towards practice. It generates fundamental knowledge about the complexity of happiness. By employing this approach, it is possible to highlight how happiness is enacted as part of and in relation to ideals of family life, time, childhood, money, consumption, experiences and material things. As we explore the practices of children and their families, we discover that shifting meanings of happiness are located in contemporary culture, where emotions and consumption are of central importance.
The approach is interdisciplinary, and draws on theoretical and methodological contributions in sociology, anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Notions of meshwork and enactment become important for the exploration of happiness as a complex and changing matter, which productively involves social relations and material things. Throughout the thesis there is a dialogue with previous research on happiness, consumption and childhood which highlights the importance of exploring messy practices, in movement. It is argued that explorations of practice contribute to a critical understanding of how happiness and contemporary ideals of childhood can be approached – through consumption and as part of citizenship in a consumer society where happiness is of central importance.
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Danish is a Scandinavian language spoken by 5–6 million speakers. The semantics and pragmatics of Danish are in many ways closer to English and the Anglosphere than to the continental European languages. At the same time Danish has its own distinctive character formed by the history of Danish discourse, which is reflected in cultural keywords, such as hygge “pleasant togetherness,” and in an egalitarian communicative ethos.
Mobilität ist ein Kennzeichen menschlicher Interaktion. Dabei sind nicht nur Menschen mobil, sondern auch Produkte, Unternehmen, Kapital, Kommunikation und Werbung. Das Kommunizieren über nationale, sprachliche oder kulturelle Grenzen hinweg ist eine Grundsatzbedingung für alle Unternehmen, die außerhalb ihres einheimischen Marktes tätig sind. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es daher, die Mobilität einer Werbekampagne zu untersuchen. Als Fallstudie dient die Kampagne „The Danish Way“ des dänischen Braukonzerns Carlsberg, weil durch ihre spezifische kommunikative Mobilität unterschiedliche Deutungspotenziale deutlich werden. Da die Kampagne ursprünglich für einen ausländischen Markt konzipiert wurde, anschließend aber auch im einheimischen Markt zum Einsatz kam, kann die Mobilität der Kampagne interessante Erkenntnisse über die unterschiedliche Interpretation des auf die Unternehmensidentität bezogenen und des nationalen Ausgangspunktes abwerfen. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Fragestellung, in welcher Weise Botschaftsinhalt und -gestaltung bei der grenzüberschreitenden Kommunikation bei fremdkulturellen und eigenkulturellen Zielgruppen unterschiedlichen Interpretationsprogrammen unterliegen. Die Kampagne soll daraufhin untersucht werden, inwieweit die reproduzierten nationalen Eigenschaften plausibilisiert werden können oder unternehmenskulturelle Qualitäten als nationalkulturell etikettiert werden. Durch eine hermeneutische Vorgehensweise soll der Beitrag insgesamt Aufschluss über die Rolle von nationalen Identitätskonstruktionen in der internationalen Werbekommunikation bringen.
This article approaches “happiness” as a discursive construct. We examine different understandings of happiness as socially transmitted, linguistically formulated epistemological models by which humans reflexively evaluate and rationalize their experiences and identities. Our data consists of a set of Finnish online discourses that discuss the causes of happiness. We examine media platforms that mass-mediate popular discourses of happiness to individuals and allow individuals to voice their “indigenous” understandings. We analyze the linguistic, interactional, and interdiscursive characteristics of such views of happiness and show how they emerge and circulate in society disseminating mutually competing epistemologies of happiness. We also aim to show how the cross-cultural and culture-internal variation of these models becomes linked to ideological conflicts and politics of identity. On the one hand, our examples echo the kinds of individualistic, depoliticized views of happiness that have been seen as characteristic of modern media. On the other hand, they show that smaller-scale, local views of happiness tend to be more varied and attract explicit identity-political debates.
This paper explores conceptualisations of xoshbaxti (‘happiness / prosperity’) and baxt (‘fate / luck’) in Persian, adopting a combined historical and contemporary analysis. The expression xoshbaxti consists of the free morphemes xosh (‘pleasant’) and baxt (‘fate’).
The root of baxt originates from the Proto-Indo-European language ( bʰeh₂g ). An historical analysis returning all the way to the Proto-Indo-Iranian religion shows that the concept of baxt captured the idea of a pre-determined destiny by conceptualising Bhaga as a god who dispenses fortune. Data from a number of Persian encyclopaedias, dictionaries and weblogs, as well as a word association task carried out by a group of speakers of Persian, revealed that xoshbaxti in contemporary Persian is largely associated with what is considered to be a “good” married life. Overall, the findings of this study illustrate the usefulness of combining diachronic and synchronic approaches when analysing cultural conceptualisations. The study also shows that attempts to trace the historical roots of cultural conceptualisations may benefit from insights gained in other fields, such as the history of religions. In this context, the multidisciplinary nature of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics provides an effective basis for cross-disciplinary openness, which has the potential to deepen the scope of analyses undertaken.
The lexicographic study of postcolonial language varieties is severely undertheorized and underdeveloped. Against that background, this paper develops a new framework, Postcolonial Lexicography. This framework aims at providing a new praxis of word definition for the study of Creoles, world Englishes, and other languages spoken in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on advances in lexical semantics, linguistic ethnography and postcolonial language studies, the paper offers an original analysis of emotion words in Urban Bislama, a creole language spoken in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The paper develops a sketch of the Bislama lexicon of emotion and provides new definitions of kros, roughly "angry," les, roughly "annoyed" and sem, roughly "ashamed." The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is utilized as an interpretative technique for the definition of meaning. The NSM approach allows for a fine-grained lexical-semantic analysis, and at the same time, it helps circumvent "conceptual colonialism" and the related vices of Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism, all of which hamper advances in the field of lexicographic studies in postcolonial context.
This chapter explores the ethnopragmatic conceptualization of happiness and sadness in the language of the Irish citizens who immigrated to North America between 1811 and 1880, on the basis of a corpus of Irish emigrants’ personal correspondence. In particular, this study proposes a Natural Semantic Metalanguage examination of the emotional load of the positive adjectives happy and glad, and their negative counterparts, unhappy and sad, in order to elucidate Irish emigrants’ psychological states of mind and emotional responses to transatlantic migrations and life abroad.
While it is commonplace that Irish emigration to the New World generated a series of contradictory emotional responses, we believe that there is a scarcity of empirical and diachronic studies focusing on the intersection of Irish emigration, specifically on the relationship between pragmatics and emotions. Taking Mey’s (Pragmatics. An introduction. Blackwell, Oxford, 2001) pragmatic acts theory as a point of departure, the study investigates the pragmatic uses of key emotion terms in the corpus based upon the semantic explications developed by Wierzbicka (Emotions across languages and cultures: diversity and universals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999). In our opinion, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework can be fruitfully used as an analytic tool to unveil the linguistic specificities embedded in the conceptualization of psychological acts such as emotions.
The Danish word
lige
[ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English
please
, German
bitte
, or similar constructs in other European languages. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot ‘say please’, and Danish children cannot ‘say the magic word’. However,
lige
is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic that has almost been left unstudied because it does not correlate well with any of the major Anglo-international research questions such as “how to express politeness” or “how to make a request.” This paper analyzes the semantics of
lige
in order to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated not only that Danish
lige
does a different semantic job than English
please
, but also that
please
-based and
lige
-based interactions are bound to different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations, and reflect differing cultural values.
This is the introductory chapter of the edited collection "Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context" (Goddard, ed 2006, Mouton de Gruyter)
In this ground-breaking new book, Anna Wierzbicka brings psychological, anthropological and linguistic insights to bear on our understanding of the way emotions are expressed and experienced in different cultures, languages and culturally shaped social relations. The expression of emotion in the face, body and modes of speech are all explored and Wierzbicka shows how the bodily expression of emotion varies across cultures and challenges traditional approaches to the study of facial expressions. As well as offering a new perspective on human emotions based on the analysis of language and ways of talking about emotion, this fascinating and controversial book attempts to identify universals of human emotion by analysing empirical evidence from different languages and cultures. This book will be invaluable to academics and students of emotion across the Social Sciences.
Although income and happiness have been linked at both the individual and national levels of analysis, few studies have specifically
examined the different relationships between these two variables in affluent nations. This study investigates various measures
of well-being in both the United States and Denmark. Respondents in both countries reported high levels of well-being but
Americans generally reported greater positive and negative affect while Danes reported higher levels of satisfaction and enjoyment.
Interestingly, low income respondents in the United States reported higher negative affect and lower life satisfaction than
their counterparts in Denmark. For positive affect, the major difference between the two countries was found among high income
respondents. The key to understanding differences in the well-being of these two nations appears to lie in understanding the
well-being of the poor. Suggestions for future directions in research are discussed.
KeywordsLife satisfaction-Positive affect-Happiness-Denmark-USA-Income
This paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is construed in Scandinavian semantic systems vis-a-vis the semantic system of English. With an extensive case study of neck-related meanings in Danish, and with cross-Scandinavian reference, it is demonstrated that Scandinavian and English systems differ significantly in some aspects of the way in which the construe the human body with words. The study ventures an innovative combination of methods, pairing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to linguistic and conceptual analysis with empirical evidence from the Evolution of Semantic Systems (EoSS) project. This combination of empirical and interpretative tools helps to integrate evidence from semantics and semiotics, pinning out in great detail the intricacies of the meanings of particular body words. The paper concludes that body words in closely related languages can differ substantially in their semantics. In related languages, where shared lexical form does not always mean shared semantics, ethnolinguistic studies in semantic change and shifts in polysemy patterns can help to reveal and explain the roots of semantic diversity.
There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmark's peasant-farmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in today's society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as ‘nice pigs’, vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as ‘nasty pigs’. Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is utilized in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that ‘pigs in language’ is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of pig-words and the culture-specific ‘meaning of pigs’ in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of ‘animal concepts’ in the world's languages: it also calls for a cultural-semantic approach to the study of social cognition.
This article focuses on the emergence of a new subfield of emotion research known as “history of emotions.” People’s emotional lives depend on the construals which they impose on events, situations, and human actions. Different cultures and different languages suggest different habitual construals, and since habitual construals change over time, as a result, habitual feelings change, too. But to study construals we need a suitable methodology. The article assumes that such a methodology is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and it applies the NSM approach to the history of “happiness,” an emotion which is very much at the forefront of current debates across a range of disciplines. The article shows how the “history of emotions” can be combined with cultural semantics and why this combination opens new perspectives before the whole interdisciplinary field of emotion research.
The discourse and semantics of livet ‘life’ in the Danish golden age
- Hamann
What’s wrong with “happiness studies”. The cultural semantics of happiness, bonheur, Glück and Sčast’e’
- Wierzbicka