The relationship of language and culture

Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When it is used in contexts of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways.

1. Language expresses cultural reality. The words people utter refer to the common experience. They express facts, ideas, events that are communicable because they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that other people share. Words also reflect their authors’ attitudes and beliefs, their point of view.

2. Language embodies cultural reality. But members of a community or social group do not only express experience; they also create experience through language. The way in which people use the spoken, written, or visual medium itself creates meanings that are understandable to the group they belong to, for example, through a speaker’s tone of voice, accent, conversational style, gestures and facial expressions.

3. Language symbolizes cultural reality. Language is a system of signs that is seen as having itself a cultural value. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language; they view their language as a symbol of their social identity.

Nature, culture, language

One way of thinking about culture is to contrast it with nature. Nature refers to what is born and grows originally (Latin “nascere” – to be born); culture refers to what has been grown and groomed (Latin “colere” – to cultivate).

Emily Dickinson

Essential Oils – are wrung –

The Attar from Rose

Be not expressed by Suns – alone

It is the gift of Screws –

The General Rose – decay –

But this – in Lady’s Drawer

Make Summer – When the lady lie

In Ceaseless Rosemary –

The poem expresses in a stylized way the relationship of nature, culture, and language. A rose in a flower bed (The General Rose - generic) is a phenomenon of nature – beautiful, but faceless and nameless among the same species. Perishable. Forgettable. Nature alone cannot reveal nor preserve the particular beauty of a particular rose at a chosen moment in time. Nature can only make summer when the season is right. Culture is not bound by biological time. Through a sophisticated technology, logical procedure, developed especially to extract the essence of roses, culture forces nature to reveal its essential potentialities. The word Screws suggests that this process is not without labour. By crushing the petals, a great deal of the rose must be lost in order to get its essence. The same is the technology of the word. It selects among the many potential meanings that a rose might have. Culture makes the rose petals into a rare perfume, purchased at high cost, for a particular, personal use of a particular lady. The Lady may die, but the fragrance of the rose’s essence (the Attar) can make it immortal, in the same manner as the language of the poem immortalizes both the rose and the lady, and brings both back to life in the imagination of its readers. The word has immortalized nature. The nature and culture need each other.

Particular meanings are adopted by the speech communities and imposed in turn on its members. E.g. once a bouquet of roses has become codified as a society’s way of expressing love, it becomes risky for lovers to express their love without resorting to the symbols that their society imposes upon them, and to offer chrysanthemums as a sign of love ( which in Germany are reserved for the dead).

The screws that language and culture impose on nature correspond to various forms of socialization and acculturation. Etiquette, expressions of politeness, social dos and donts shape people’s behavior through behavioral upbringing, schooling, professional training. These ways with language, or norms of interaction and interpretation, form part of invisible ritual imposed by culture on language users.

Communities of language users

Social conventions, norms of social appropriateness, are product of communities of language users.

Speech community is composed of people who use the same linguistic code.

People who identify themselves as members of a social group (family, neighborhood, professional or ethnic affiliation, nation) acquire common ways of viewing the world through the interactions with other members of the same group. These views are reinforced through institutions like the family, the school, the workplace , the church, the government. Discourse communities refer to the common ways in which members of a social group use language to meet their social needs. Not only the grammatical, lexical, and phonological features of their language (for example, teenage talk, professional jargon, political rhetoric) differentiate them from others, but also the topics they choose to talk about, the way they present the information, the style with which they interact – their discourse accent. E.g. reaction to the compliment. The Americans – Thank you, the French – downplay the compliment and minimize its value.

The diachronic view of culture focuses on the way in which a social group represents itself and others through its material productions over time – its technological achievements, its monuments, its works of art, its popular culture – that punctuate the development of the historical identity. This material culture is reproduced and preserved through institutional mechanisms that are also part of the culture, like museums, schools, public libraries, governments, corporations and the media. Language plays a major role in the perpetuation of culture, particularly in its printed form.

Imagined communities

These two layers of culture combined, the social (synchronic) and the historical (diachronic), have often been called the sociocultural context of language study. The third layer is imagination. Discourse communities are characterized not only by facts and artifacts, but by common dreams, fulfilled and unfulfilled imaginings. These imaginings are mediated through the language.

Insiders/outsiders

To identify themselves as members of a community, people have to define themselves jointly as insiders against the others, outsiders. There is a hegemonic effect of dominant cultures in representing the Other. Knowledge itself is coloured by the social and historical context n which it is acquired and disseminated.

In the social, the historic, and the imagined dimension, culture is heterogeneous. Members of the same discourse community all have different biographies and life experiences, they may differ in age, gender, or ethnicity, they have different political opinions. Cultures change over time.

In summary, culture can be defined as membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings.

1. Culture is always the result of human intervention in the biological process of nature.

2. Culture both liberates and constrains. It liberates by investing the randomness of nature with meaning, order, and rationality and by providing safeguards against chaos; it constrains by imposing a structure on nature and by limiting the range of possible meanings created by the individual.

3. Culture is the product of socially and historically situated discourse communities, that are to a large extent imagined communities, created and shaped by language.

4. A community’s language and its material achievements represent a social patrimony and a symbolic capital that serve to perpetuate relationship of power and domination; they distinguish insiders from outsiders.

5. Cultures are fundamentally heterogeneous and changing, they are a constant site of struggle for recognition and legitimation.

Linguistic relativity

In the 19th century scholars put forward the idea that different people speak differently because they think differently, and they think differently because their language offers them different ways of expressing the world around them. This notion was picked up by Franz Boas (1858-1942), and subsequently by Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941).

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1940)

The hypothesis makes the claim that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one thinks and behaves. E.g. English speakers conceive of time as a linear, objective sequence of events encoded in a system of past, present, and future tenses, or a discrete number of days as encoded in cardinal numerals. The English language binds English speaker to a Newtonian view of objectified time, neatly bounded and classifiable, ideal for record-keeping, time-saving, clock-punching, but is incapable of expressing time as a cyclic, unitary whole. The Hopi conceive of it as intensity and duration in the analysis and reporting of experience (They stayed 10 days= They stayed until the 11th day/ left after the 10th day). The Hopi language does not regard time as measurable length, but as relation between two events in lateness.

Despite the general translatability from one language to another, there will always be an incommensurable residue of untranslatable culture associated with the linguistic structures of any given language.

Modern scholars prove that understanding across languages does not depend on structural equivalences but on common conceptual systems, born from the larger context of our experiences.

Summary

1. There is nowadays a recognition that language, as code, reflects cultural preoccupations and constrains the way people think.

2. We recognize how important context is in complementing the meanings encoded in the language.

Meaning as sign

Language can mean in two fundamental ways, both of which are intimately linked to culture: through what it says or what it refers to as an encoded sign (semantics), and through what it does as an action in context (pragmatics).

The linguistic sign

The crucial feature that distinguishes humans from animals is humans’ capacity to create signs that mediate between them and their environment. Every meaning-making practice makes use of two elements: a signifier and a signified. Thus, for example, the sound [rouz] or the four letters of the word “rose” are signifiers for a concept related to an object in the real world with a thorny stem and many petals. The signifier (sound or word) in itself is not a sign unless someone recognizes it as such and relates it to a signified (concept); for example, for someone who does not know English, the sound signifies nothing because it is not a sign, but only a meaningless sound. A sign is therefore neither the word itself nor the object it refers to but the relation between the two.

There is nothing necessary about the relation between a given word as a linguistic signifier and a signified object. The word “rose” can be related to flowers of various shapes, consistencies, colours and smells, it can also refer to a colour, or to a smell. Conversely, the object “rose” can be given meaning by a variety of signifiers: Morning Glory, Madame Meillon, flower, die Rose, une rose. Because there is nothing inherent in the nature of a rose that makes the four letters of itσ English signifier more plausible than the five letters of the Greek word ροδον , the linguistic sign has been called arbitrary. Furthermore, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, the dualism of the linguistic sign has been called asymmetrical.

The meanings of signs

The words are the referents of objects. Their meaning that can be looked up in the dictionary is denotative. On the other hand, the meaning of the word is linked to the many associations they evoke in the minds (rose – love, passion, beauty). These are connotations. The meaning can be also iconic. An iconic meaning of words based on resemblance of words to reality, e.g. onomatopoeia. It is the image of the object signified. Exclamations like “Whoops!”, “Wow!”, “Whack!” don’t so much refer to the emotions or actions as they imitate them (onomatopoeia).

Cultural encodings

Code is a formal system of communication. The experience can be encoded differently by different discourse communities. For example, table, Tisch, mesa denote the same object by reference to a piece of furniture, but whereas the English sign “table” denotes all tables, Polish encodes dining tables as stol, coffee tables or telephone tables as stolik. British English encodes anything south of the diaphragm as “stomach”, whereas in American English a “stomachache” denotes something different from a “bellyache”. Similarly, Bavarian German encodes the whole leg from the hip to the toes through one sign, das Bein, whereas English needs at least three words “hip”, “leg”, or “foot”. Cultural encodings can change over time in the same language. For example, German that used to encode a state of happiness as glűcklich, now encodes deep happiness as glűcklich, superficial happiness as happy.

E.g. stone falls.

The encoding of experience differs also in the nature of the cultural associations evoked by different linguistic signs. For example, although the words “soul” and “mind” are usually seen as the English equivalents of the Russian word “душа”, each of these signs is differently associated with their respective objects. For a Russian, “душа” is used more frequently than “soul” and “mind” in English. And through its associations with religion, goodness, and the mystical essence of things it connotes quite a different concept than the English.

Душа –

• бессмертное духовное существо, одаренное разумом и волею (человек с духом и телом – ни души нет дома; у него сто душ крестьян; прописные души – пропущенные в народной переписи; мертвые души – умершие в промежуток между двумя переписями, но числящиеся по уплате податей / человек бестелесный по смерти своей – отдать богу душу; положить душу – жизнь, заложить за к-л душу – ручаться; на душе легко/тяжело; отпусти душу на покаяние – не губи напрасно, дай пожить; в чем душа держится)

• душевные и духовные качества человека, совесть, внутреннее чувство – человек с слабою душой; взять на душу; в его сочинениях много души; быть душой компании; душа-человек; душа не на месте – тревожиться; отвести душу – утешиться; жить душа в душу; у меня дело это на душе лежит – забота не дает покоя; это на твоей душе – совести; покривить душой – поступить против совести; затаить в душе – держать в тайне; душа замирает – лишаюсь чувств; на душу мутит, с души тянет – делается дурно; душа не принимает этого; душа меру знает; рад душой, от души – искренне; души не чаять; по душе; лезть в душу; за душой ничего нет; плоть душе ворог; грешное тело и душу съело; свет в храме от свечи, а в душе от молитвы; муж голова, жена душа; покуда душа жива; хоть шуба овечья, да душа человечья; хоть мошна пуста, да душа чиста; стоять над душой; душа божья, голова царская, спина барская; своя душа не холоп; у немца ножки тоненьки, душа коротенька; душа пузыри пускает – отрыгивается; в чужую душу не влезешь; чужая душа потемки; человек видим, а душа нет; сколько душе угодно; душа не принимает, а глаза все больше просят; душу вынуть.

• ямочка на шее над грудною костью

• душечка, душевный, душить, душистый, душник, душный, душевредный, душепагубный, душегуб, душеприказчик.

Anna Wierzbicka Semantics, Culture, and Cognition : Are emotions universal or culture-specific? According to Izard and Buechler (1980) the fundamental emotions are 1) interest, 2) joy, 3) surprise, 4) sadness, 5) anger, 6) disgust, 7) contempt, 8) fear, 9) shame/shyness and 10) guilt. These emotions are identified by means of English words. Polish does not have a word corresponding exactly to “disgust”. An Australian Aboriginal language, Gidjingali, does not lexically distinguish “fear” from “shame”, they have one lexical item.

Studies of the semantic networks of bilingual speakers make these associations visible. For example, bilingual speakers of English and Spanish have been shown to activate different associations within one of their languages and across their two languages. In English they would associate “house” with “window”, and “boy” with “girl”, but in Spanish they may associate casa with madre, and muchacho with hombre. But even within the same speech community, signs might have different semantic values for people from different discourse communities. Anglophone readers of Dickinson’s poem who happen to not to be members of her special discourse community, might not know the denotational meaning of the word “Attar”, nor associate “rosemary” with the dead. Nor might be iconic aspects of the poem be evident to them (“s”). Even though they may be native speakers of English, their cultural literacy is different from that of Emily Dickinson’s intended readers.

Words can also serve as culturally informed icons for the concepts, objects, or person they signify. For example, English speakers may intensify denotative meanings by iconically elongating the vowel of a word: “It’s beau::::::::tiful!” In French intensification of the sound is often done not through elongation of the vowel but through rapid reiteration of the same form:”Vite vite vite vite vite! (quick)”. These different prosodic encodings form distinct way of speaking viewed as typically English or French. Similarly, onomatopoeia links objects and sounds in seemingly inevitable ways for members of a given culture. For example, the English sounds “bash”, “mash”, “smash”, “crash”, “dash”, “lash”, “clash”, “trash”, “splash”, “flash” are for English speakers icons for sudden violent movement or action. A speaker of another language might not hear in the sound [æʃ] any such icon at all. Think of the sounds the animals produce.

It is important to mention that the differences noted above among the different languages are not only differences in the code itself, but in the semantic meanings attributed to these different encodings by language-using communities. It is these meanings that make the linguistic sign into a cultural sign.