The relationship between language and culture
Introduction
Language is the important means of communication, and it is the carrier of culture and a part of culture, any language was born with formation of its culture, develops with thedevelopment of culture, and in most cases, perishes with death of its culture.
1. Language, as a concrete system of signs, has its own significance in the culture communication
It has long been recognized that language is an essential and important part of a given culture and that the importance of culture upon a given language is something indispensable.
1.1 Language is a system
The important of language to the study intercultural communication is clearly captured in the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s simple sentence “Language is the archives of history.” His declaration takes on added significance when we realize that one of the major characteristics identifying us as human is our ability to use language –to make sounds and marks serve as substitutes for things and feelings.
Over millions of years, we have evolved the anatomy necessary to produce and receive sounds have taken on meaning by representing things, feelings, and ideas. This combination of evolution and culture has led to the development of a four-part process that enables us share our internal states with other human beings. In short, we can receive, store, manipulate, and generate symbols to represent our personalized realities.
1.2 The importance of language
Language is extremely important to human interaction because it is how we reach out to make contract with our surroundings. If we were to survey a normal day, we would soon see that we use words for a wide variety of purposes we may use language when we first awake: “Good morning!” We use words as a w ay to write with the outside world. Or we may use words to share an unpleasant experience and to get support from other: “Let me tell you about the horrible dream I had last night.” This example also demonstrates how we employ words to relate to the past, that is, to talk about something that has already happened.
We use words so that we can experience some control over the present: “please pass me the
salt and pepper.” We each seek to affect our environment, to influence many lf the daily situations in w
hich we find ourselves. Words, and how we manipulate them, permit us to make those alterations through symbolic transactions with others.
We also use words to form images of the future: “I have meet with Jane at work today, but I dread seeing her, because I know she’s going to be upset about the changes I’m making in her work schedule.” Our wording ability allows us to predict and describe the future .We use words to persuade to exchange ideas, to exchange ideas, to express views, to seek information, and to express feelings. When we study another language, we soon discover that the symbols, the sounds for those symbols, and the rules for using those symbols and sounds are different.
2. Language, as a culture institution, is born with culture. It develops and interacts with the culture
To preserve the language of a nation is to preserve its special culture and history. When people can not understand the old language, they will be less tightly connected to or even gradually lose their cultures and histories. Their enemies know much more clearly than themselves as to this point.
We still remember that in the famous article The Last Lesson, the first thing Prussians did when they intruded France, was to replace French with Prussian in the school education. Japanese also took the same strategy in order to cut off the connection between people and their histories and cultures. This e
vil refused to only stay in people's memory and is still threatening certain cultures and nations. Thus both Jews and Tibetans are still fighting to preserve their languages for the sake of their cultures and histories at the edge of being extinguished.
2.1 Explain the meaning of the culture
When delivering daily speech, the word "culture" refers to pursuits such as literature and music. More broadly, we can define "culture" as all the modes of thought, behavior, and production that are handed down from one generation to the next by means of communicative interaction── speech, gesture, epic, construction, and all other communication among h umans── rather than by genetic transmission or heredity. "Culture" is an essential concept for it is what makes humans unique in the animal kingdom. All familiar forms of social organizations, ranging from the simplest family to the most sophisticated corporation depend upon "culture" for their existence. Nevertheless, "society" and "culture" might be confusing for
one to distinguish. "Society" is population that is organized to carry out the major function of life.
A society's "culture" consists of all the ways in which its members think about it among themselves
Culture, in a broad sense, means the total way of life of a people, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community. As culture is so inclusive, it permeates virtually every aspect of human life and influences predominantly people’s behavior, including linguistic behavior. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local or specific practice, belief or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc.
Generally speaking, there are two types of culture: material and spiritual. While material culture, as the term itself suggests, is concrete, substantial and observable, most of spiritual culture, the products of mind, is abstract, ambiguous, and hidden. In contrast with nature in the sense of what is born and grows, culture refers to what has been grown and brought up with, in other words, what can be nurtured. Culture, especially material culture, is reproduced and preserved through the maintaining of beliefs, traditions, education and other institution mechanisms, mean while, it changes slowly with the development of the society.
2.2 The relationship between language and culture
We begin our preview of language by noting that it is impossible to separate our use if language from o
ur culture. In its most basic sense, language is a set of symbols and the rules for combining those symbols that are used and understood by a large community of people. When we study another language, we soon discover that not only are the symbol and sounds for those symbols different, but so are the rules (phonology, grammar, syntax, and intonation) for using those symbols and sounds.
Word different are obvious in various language. In English, we live in a house. In Spanish, we live on a case. In Thai we live in a ban. Phonology also varies culturally. In English, we have 21 consonant sounds and 5 vowels that combine to from 38 various sounds. “Vietnamese has 34 segmental phonemes consisting of vowels, semivowels and consonants.” The Filipino language has 16 consonants and 10 vowels forming 26 phonemes. Portuguese has 21 consonants and 13 vowels that form 34 basic phonemes. Grammatical structures are unique to each language as well. In English verb tenses express contrast between past, present, and future acts, but in Vietnamese, the same verb reflects all three and the time of action is inferred from the context. Syntax, or the
word order and structure of sentences, also varies depending on the language. The normal woes order for simple sentences in Filipino is the reverse of the word order in English. That is, the predicate is followed by the subject. For example, the English sentence “The teacher died” would be “Namatay ang guro” or “died the teacher” in Filipino. In English, the subject is followed by a verb and then an object, b
ut in Korean, the subject is followed by the object and then the verb. So in English we might say, “The cat ate the mouse,” but in Korean, “Cat mouse ate” would be correct.
These examples indicate that if we want to communicate in another language, it is important for us to know not only the symbols of that language, but also the rules for using those symbols. As you know language is much more than a symbol and rule system that allows us to communicate with another person-language also shapes the process by which people became introduced to the order of the physical and social environment. As Nanda indicates, “language, therefore, would seem to have major impact on the way an individual perceives and conceptualizes the world.”
portuguese
2.2.1Language not only express a person’s meaning but also express a nation’s culture
We can have different meanings for the same word. For instance, to one person, the woes grass might mean something in front of then house that is green, has to be watered, and must be mowed once a week: to another person, grass may mean something that is rolled in paper and smoked. All people, drawing on their backgrounds, decide what a word means. People have similar meanings only to the experience includes baseball, to us a rope is a line driver. If our background lies in the world of jazz music, the word ax does not indicate something used to chop wood but any horn or woodwind instrument. And it is likely that we and a physician respond differently to the woes cancer.
If we include culture as a variable on the process of abstracting meaning, the problems became all the more acute, for culture teaches us both the symbol and what the symbol represents. When you are communicating with someone from your own culture, the process of using words to represent your experience is much easier because within a culture people share many similar experiences. But when communication is between people from distinct cultures, different experiences are involved and the process is more troublesome. Objects, events, experiences, and feelings have the labels or names they do because a community id people arbitrarily decided to so name them. If we extent this notion to the intercultural setting, we can see that diverse cultures can have both different symbols and different responses.
There are even differences between British and American usage in word meanings. Although some words are spelled and pronounced the same, they have different meanings. For instance, the words boot, bonnet, lift, and biscuit in British English translate into American English as car trunk, car hood, elevator, and cookie. In the area of business, there are also some interesting differences. For example, the British term annual gunnel meeting translates in American English as annual meeting of shareholders; scheme translates as pension plan. From these examples, we see that culture exerts an enormous influence on language because culture teaches not rules for using those symbols and rules
for using those symbols, but more important, the meaning associate with the symbols. Further, culture influences the way people use language.
2.2.2 Language and its culture influence are exemplified in the theoretical formulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Language and its culture influence are exemplified in the theoretical formulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in essence states that language is a guide to “social reality.” This hypothesis implies that language is not simply a means of reporting experience but, more important, it is a way of defining experience. Sapir wrote:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society …The real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. Nanda provides an excellent example if the Sapir-Whorf concept in practice: If my language has only one term-brother-in-law- that is applied to my
sister’s husband, my husband’s brothers, and my husband’s sisters’ husbands, I am led by my language to perceive all of these relatives in a similar way. Vocabulary, through what it groups together under one label and what it differentiates with different labels, is one way in which language shapes our perception of the world.
3. Linguistic evidence of cultural difference
Any linguistic may be simultaneously of a denotative, connotative, or iconic kind of meanings. To begin with, any sign has a meaning that can be found in a dictionary, this is the denotative meaning. For example, “rose” is a flower that has a pleasant smell and is usually red,

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