Language and Culture

Language doesn’t exist apart from culture. I.e. from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our life.

Culture may be defined as a selected inventory of experience

Language is a particular manner in which the society expresses all experience.

It goes without saying that the mere content of l is intimately related to Culture.

Aborigines who had never seen or heard of a horse were compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal when they made acquaintance with it.

A society that has no knowledge of something needs no name for it.

So the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects the culture.

We shouldn’t identify the language with its vocabulary.

The complete vocabulary of a language may be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests and occupations that take up the attention of the community.

Objects and forces in the physical environment become labeled in language only if they have cultural significance.

A link between form and meaning is a matter of convention, and conventions differ radically across languages.

Words are arbitrary in form, but they are not random in their use.

On the contrary it is because the linguistic forms do not resemble what they signify and that’s why that they can be used to encode what is significant by convention in different communities.

The fact that there is no natural connection between the form of words and what they mean makes it possible for different communities to use language to divide up reality in ways that suit them.

Bedouin Arabic has a number of terms for the animal which in English is usually encoded simply as “camel”. These terms are convenient labels for differences important to the Arabs, but none of them actually resembles a camel.

In English there is a whole of terms for different kinds of dogs: hound, mastiff, spaniel, terrier, poodle, and each will call up different images.

The relationship of vocabulary and cultural value is multidirectional.

Sapir’s understanding of language

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntary produced symbols.

Speech is an acquired, cultural function.

To speak is to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society.

Speech is a human activity that varies as we pass from social group to social group because it is a purely historical heritage of a group, the product of long-continued social usage. Speech varies as all creative effort does – religion, customs, beliefs, arts.

It is wrong to say that the l is localized in the brain. We have no organs of speech – there’s organs that are useful in the production of speech sounds.

L is a fully formed functional system within man’s physic constitution.

The essence of language consists in the assigning of conventional, voluntary articulated sounds to the diverse elements of experience.

To be communicated experience has to be referred to a class which is accepted by the community as an identity.

The single significant element of speech is the symbol of a “concept” – a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences.

The actual flow of speech is a record of the setting of these concepts into mutual relations.

Sapir’ Thought and language

The opinion that people can think without language is an allusion:

• Thought may be a natural domain apart from the artificial domain of speech, but speech would seem to be the only road we know that leads to it.

• All this doesn’t mean that language works itself before thinking.

• Thinking is a kind of psychic overflow that comes at the beginning of linguistic expression.

• The birth of a new concept is foreshadowed by a more or less extended use of old linguistic material. As soon as the world is at hand, we feel that the concept is ours for handling.

• Not until we own the symbol do we hold a key to the understanding to the concept.

• Speakers give names (words) to important entities and events in the physical and social worlds, and, once named, those entities and events become culturally and individually noticed and experienced.

• Through these interdependent processes unique cultural models are created and reinforced.

• “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct words, not merely the same world with different labels attached”.

Whorf’s understanding of language

The influence of language can be both through the vocabulary and through more complex grammatical structures.

In the following English sentences Hopi people would use a different word for that:

1. I see that it is red. – direct sensory awareness

2. I see that it is new. – makes inferences

3. I hear that it is red. – speaker reports a fact provided by someone else.

4. I hear that it is new.

Hopi people are directed by grammatical requirements of their language to notice underlying causes of their knowledge of things: through direct senses, through inferences, through reported facts.

Speakers of English need not pay attention to such differences (it doesn’t mean that they are never aware of these differences)

Time, number, duration are fundamental.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The weak version: some elements of language, e.g. in vocabulary and grammatical system, influence speakers’ perception and can affect their attitudes and behavior.

The strong version: language is ultimately directive in this process.

“WE see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the L and the L habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation”.

Bakhtin: “There is no such thing as experience outside the embodiment in signs…it is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around – expression organizes experience”. An individual’s thought is guided by possibilities offered by his or her language.

English speaker – I must go there. I make the horse run.

Navajo speaker – It is only good that I shall go there. The horse is running for me.

They have different attitudes about peoples’ rights and obligations. English speakers encode the rights of people to control other beings, either people or animals or the rights of people to be controlled themselves. In contrast, Navajo speakers give all beings the ability to decide for themselves without control from others. Thought is guided by the possibilities of the language.