Language and Culture

9.1. What is Culture? In the anthropological sense culture is the total way of human life. – Culture permeates every aspect of human life. It conditions and determines all of human behavior, including linguistic behavior. From the viewpoint of philosophy, language is related to cognition, and cognition in turn is related to the cultural setting.

In the narrow sense, culture refers to local or specific practice, traditions, beliefs or customs. So we have, e.g. food culture, wine culture, tea culture, etc. In the broad sense, there are two types of culture: material culture and spiritual culture.

Material culture is concrete, substantial and observable. Spiritual culture includes ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space is implicit, hidden and abstract,.

9.2. The relationship between language and culture 1) If culture and language are two systems, then culture is a wider system than language, as illustrated in the following: Culture completely includes linguistic behavior. Language is a subsystem of culture. So the relation of language to culture is a relation of part to whole.

2) Language as a semiotic system is regarded as a symbol of social identity （社会認同）. Language not only expresses facts, ideas, or events, but also reflects the people’s attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks, and social traditions, conventions, and norms, because language possesses its own cultural substances and values.

3) Culture as the total way of human life both emancipates and constrains people socially, historically and metaphorically. For example: – Money is the lens in a camera. (J. T. Adams) – Here we have the metaphoric use of language. Money like lens can examine a person’s quality and attitude.

4) People of the same speech or discourse community （話語社區） share the same grammatical, lexical and phonological features, but due to different regions and different social status, they may show differences in grammar, lexis and phonology.

– He be here I don’t get none. I gonna do it. We have no difficulty to identify these sentences as Black English. Also we can find different discourse accents, such as farm [f  ] and [f  ] in New York city.

5) Language and culture cannot be separated. Linguistic competence is one variety of cultural competence, and speech behavior is one variety of social behavior.

9. 3. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis It is also called linguistic relativity （语言相对 性）, proposed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, two American linguists. Language filters people’s perception and the way they categorize experiences, in other words, they claim that a language determined the thought and perception of its speakers.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has two versions: strong and weak. – The strong version believes that the language patterns determine people’s thinking and behavior. – The weak version holds that language patterns influence people’s thinking and behaviors.. So far, many researchers have agreed upon the weak version.

9. 4. Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Differences Greeting and terms of address Gratitude and compliments Colour words Privacy and taboos Rounding off numbers Words and cultural-specific connotations Cultural-related idioms, proverbs and metaphors