Language

Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" - the forms of
communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of
human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the
systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of symbols, each referring to concepts
different from themselves.

The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages, such as English or Chinese. For
example the English word "language", derived ultimately from lingua, Latin for tongue, and
"tongue" is still a word which can be used in English to refer to spoken language. But there are
also written languages, and other systems of visual symbols, sign languages and so on.

Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these
are sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of
all of the properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.

When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a
particular type of human thought which which can be present even when communication is not
the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language
itself.

In Western Philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with reason,
which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical
terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason,
and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could
refer to reason, as will be discussed below.

Cultural

Culture is the context of the social encounters between human beings, which involve language.
Each cultural group has a mother tongue and may have one or more additional languages.
Shared experiences become a common basis of identity for a grouping, which we may call a
people, or a culture.

Previous experiences affect expectations. Thus differences in the experiences related to history,
and cultural or ethnic identity lead to differences in expectations for communication events. This,
in turn, again involves and affects language use.

The culture of a community is integrally related to the language they speak. However, many
different peoples may speak the same or very similar language, but still differ somewhat
culturally. Spanish, Swahili and French are examples of multi-national, multi-ethnic languages.
Thus the people's identity (and their worldview) differ from others who may speak the same
language, due to different sets of experiences and the resulting different sets of expectations exist
even in the same language "community." Language alone, as a technical, abstract, academic
subject, is not sufficient. You must learn the people and their particular culture to communicate
effectively.

Most people intuitively know this, but it is overlooked when we approach the actual learning,
because we are so school oriented, that many westerners do not think they can learn unless they
are in a school. Then if they lack such a resource they see no options.
A large part of cultural knowledge is cognitive. You can gain an entrance into this cognitive world
through explanations in your native language. You can watch movies for cultural insight, you can
read sources in your native tongue -- all these can help you move into target language. But these
do not cover the social aspect of culture.

Language is a primary medium of the social culture. Each social encounter is a communication
event. Language is a medium of interaction in social relationships.

Communication events involve exchange of cultural information. This is managed in the target
language of the culture group and in the context of their common experiences.

Social

Language is a social medium, and thus a social skill. Language is a major component in social
events, communication events, interaction with other people. In common teaching approaches,
language is often isolated from its practical context. Learning a dialogue only in a classroom, for
instance, gives no context for memory other than the classroom. Then every language text
learned in that classroom has the very same memory context! No wonder learners get tired and
find it hard to remember words or phrases.

Learning language as a social skill heightens memory and competency. Learners can retain
much more, with less memory work, by association with total event, place, relationship, action or
movement, emotion, smell and sound. Languages are used by social groups (families, clans,
tribes, societies) to manage their relationships and cultural roles, obligations and
interrelationships.

For the purposes of the Intercultural Studies Project, culture is defined as the shared patterns of
behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned
through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group
while also distinguishing those of another group.

Other Definitions of Culture

Banks, J.A., Banks, & McGee, C. A. (1989). Multicultural education. Needham Heights, MA:
Allyn & Bacon.

"Most social scientists today view culture as consisting primarily of the symbolic, ideational, and
intangible aspects of human societies. The essence of a culture is not its artifacts, tools, or other
tangible cultural elements but how the members of the group interpret, use, and perceive them. It
is the values, symbols, interpretations, and perspectives that distinguish one people from another
in modernized societies; it is not material objects and other tangible aspects of human societies.
People within a culture usually interpret the meaning of symbols, artifacts, and behaviors in the
same or in similar ways."

Damen, L. (1987). Culture Learning: The Fifth Dimension on the Language Classroom.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
"Culture: learned and shared human patterns or models for living; day- to-day living patterns.
these patterns and models pervade all aspects of human social interaction. Culture is mankind's
primary adaptive mechanism" (p. 367).

Hofstede, G. (1984). National cultures and corporate cultures. In L.A. Samovar & R.E.
Porter (Eds.), Communication Between Cultures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

"Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one
category of people from another." (p. 51).

Kluckhohn, C., & Kelly, W.H. (1945). The concept of culture. In R. Linton (Ed.). The Science
of Man in the World Culture. New York. (pp. 78-105).

"By culture we mean all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational,
irrational, and nonrational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of
men."

Kroeber, A.L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and
definitions. Harvard University Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology
Papers 47.

" Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by
symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments
in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and
selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be
considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action."

Lederach, J.P. (1995). Preparing for peace: Conflict transformation across cultures.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

"Culture is the shared knowledge and schemes created by a set of people for perceiving,
interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around them" (p. 9).

Linton, R. (1945). The Cultural Background of Personality. New York.

"A culture is a configuration of learned behaviors and results of behavior whose component
elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society" (p. 32).

Parson, T. (1949). Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe, IL.

"Culture...consists in those patterns relative to behavior and the products of human action which
may be inherited, that is, passed on from generation to generation independently of the biological
genes" (p. 8).

Useem, J., & Useem, R. (1963). Human Organizations, 22(3).

"Culture has been defined in a number of ways, but most simply, as the learned and shared
behavior of a community of interacting human beings" (p. 169).

Language and Culture

There are many ways in which the phenomena of language and culture are intimately related.
Both phenomena are unique to humans and have therefore been the subject of a great deal of
anthropological, sociological, and even memetic study. Language, of course, is determined by
culture, though the extent to which this is true is now under debate. The converse is also true to
some degree: culture is determined by language - or rather, by the replicators that created both,
memes.

Language as Determined by Culture

Early anthropologists, following the theory that words determine thought, believed that language
and its structure were entirely dependent on the cultural context in which they existed. This was a
logical extension of what is termed the Standard Social Science Model, which views the human
mind as an indefinitely malleable structure capable of absorbing any sort of culture without
constraints from genetic or neurological factors.

In this vein, anthropologist Verne Ray conducted a study in the 1950's, giving color samples to
different American Indian tribes and asking them to give the names of the colors. He concluded
that the spectrum we see as "green", "yellow", etc. was an entirely arbitrary division, and each
culture divided the spectrum separately. According to this hypothesis, the divisions seen between
colors are a consequence of the language we learn, and do not correspond to divisions in the
natural world. A similar hypothesis is upheld in the extremely popular meme of Eskimo words for
snow - common stories vary from fifty to upwards of two hundred.

Extreme cultural relativism of this type has now been clearly refuted. Eskimos use at most twelve
different words for snow, which is not many more than English speakers and should be expected
since they exist in a cold climate. The color-relativity hypothesis has now been completely
debunked by more careful, thorough, and systematic studies which show a remarkable similarity
between the ways in which different cultures divide the spectrum.

Of course, there are ways in which culture really does determine language, or at least certain
facets thereof. Obviously, the ancient Romans did not have words for radios, televisions, or
computers because these items were simply not part of their cultural context. In the same vein,
uncivilized tribes living in Europe in the time of the Romans did not have words for tribunes,
praetors, or any other trapping of Roman government because Roman law was not part of their
culture.

Our culture does, sometimes, restrict what we can think about efficiently in our own language. For
example, some languages have only three color terms equivalent to black, white, and red; a
native speaker of this language would have a difficult time expressing the concept of "purple"
efficiently. Some languages are also more expressive about certain topics. For example, it is
commonly acknowledged that Yiddish is a linguistic champion, with an amazing number of words
referring to the simpleminded. (The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, p.260.)

Culture and Language - United by Memes

According to the memetic theorist Susan Blackmore, language developed as a result of memetic
evolution and is an example of memes providing a selection pressure on genes themselves. (For
more on Blackmore's theory visit The Evolution of Language.) The definition of a culture in
memetic theory is an aggregate of many different meme sets or memeplexes shared by the
majority of a population. Using memetic reasoning, it can be seen that language - itself created by
memes and for memes - is the principal medium used for spreading memes from one person to
another.

As Blackmore states in The Meme Machine, memes were born when humans began to imitate
each other. According to her theory, this event preceded - indeed, had to precede - the
development of language. When imitation became widespread, producing selection pressure on
genes for successful imitation, memes began to exploit verbalizations for better and more
frequent transmission. The end result of this complex process was language, and the anatomical
alterations needed for its successful use.

Language, created by memes as a mechanism for ensuring better memetic propagation, has
certainly been a success. Today, the vast majority of memes are transmitted via language,
through direct speech, written communication, radio or television, and the internet. Relatively few
memes are transmitted in a non-linguistic way, and those that are have very specific, localized
purposes, such as artwork and photography. Even these media, though nonlinguistic in
themselves, assume language and very rarely appear without some sort of linguistic commentary.
This might take the form of a critical analysis of an artwork, a caption for a photograph, a voice-
over for a video, etc.

Language as Part of Culture

For many people, language is not just the medium of culture but also is a part of culture. It is quite
common for immigrants to a new country to retain their old customs and to speak their first
language amid fellow immigrants, even if all present are comfortable in their new language. This
occurs because the immigrants are eager to preserve their own heritage, which includes not only
customs and traditions but also language. This is also seen in many Jewish communities,
especially in older members: Yiddish is commonly spoken because it is seen as a part of Jewish
culture.

Linguistic differences are also often seen as the mark of another culture, and they very commonly
create divisiveness among neighboring peoples or even among different groups of the same
nation. A good example of this is in Canada, where French-speaking natives of Quebec clash with
the English-speaking majority. This sort of conflict is also common in areas with a great deal of
tribal warfare. It is even becoming an issue in America as speakers of standard American English
- mainly whites and educated minorities - observe the growing number of speakers of black
English vernacular. Debates are common over whether it is proper to use "Ebonics" in schools,
while its speakers continue to assert that the dialect is a fundamental part of the "black culture".

Relationship Between Language and Culture

Language is the verbal expression of culture. A culture's language contains everything its
speakers can think about and every way they have of thinking about things. For example, the
Latin language has no word for the female friend of a man (the feminine form of amicus is amica,
which means mistress, not friend) because the Roman culture could not imagine a male and a
female being equals, which they considered necessary for friendship.

The relationship of language and culture

Source: Language and Culture, Claire Kramsch, 1998, Oxford, p. 3-5

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.
To begin with, words people utter refer to common experience. They express facts, ideas or
events that are communicable because they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that
other people share. Words also reflect their author's attitudes and beliefs, their point of view, that
are also those of others. In both cases, language expresses cultural reality.

But members of a community or a social group do not only express experiences; they also create
experience through language. They give meaning to it through the medium they choose to
communicate with one another, for example, speaking on the telephone or face-to-face, writing a
letter or sending an email message, reading the newspaper or interpreting a graph or chart. 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. Through all its verbal and non-
verbal aspects, language embodies cultural reality.

Finally, 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. The prohibition of its use is often perceived by its speakers as a
rejection of their social group and their culture. Thus, we can say that language symbolizes
cultural reality.

Culture, on the other hand, refers to what has been grown and groomed (from the Latin colere: to
cultivate). The words culture evokes the traditional nature/nurture debate. Are human beings
mainly what nature determines them to be from birth or what culture enables them to become
through socialization and schooling?
The process that language and culture impose on nature corresponds to various forms of
socialization or acculturation. Etiquette, expressions of politeness, social dos and don'ts shape
people's behavior through child rearing, behavioral upbringing, schooling, professional training.
These ways with language, or norms of interaction and interpretation, form part of the invisible
ritual imposed by culture on language users. This is culture's way of bringing order and
predictability into people's use of language.