IX Language and Culture

1. IX Language and Culture

2. 9.1 Introduction 9.2 What is culture? In broad sense, culture 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. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc. 9.3 The relationship between language and culture Since the knowledge and beliefs that constitute a people’s culture are habitually encoded and transmitted in the language of he people, it is extremely difficult to separate the two. On the one hand, language as an integral part of human being, permeates his thinking and way of viewing the world, language both expresses and embodies cultural reality On the other, language, as a product of culture, helps perpetuate the culture, and the changes in language uses reflect the cultural changes in return.

3. 9.4 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Different languages offer people different ways of expressing the world around, they think and speak differently, this is also known as linguistic relativity. Sapir and Whorf believe that language filters people’s perception and the way they categorize experiences. This interdependence of language and thought is now known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. 9.5 Linguistic evidence of cultural differences 9.5.1 Greetings and terms of address 9.5.2 Thanks and compliments 9.5.3 Color words 9.5.4 Privacy and taboos 9.5.5 Rounding off numbers 9.5.6 Words and cultural-specific connotations 9.5.7 Cultural-related idioms, proverbs and metaphors

4. 9.6 The significance of cultural teaching and learning We need to learn enough abut the language’s culture so that we can communicate in the target language properly to achieve not only the linguistic competence but also the pragmatic or communicative competence as well. 9.7 Cultural overlap and diffusion There exist a greater or lesser degree of cultural overlap between two societies owing to some similarities in the natural environment and psychology of human beings. Through communication, some elements of culture A enter cultural B and become part of culture B, thus bringing about cultural diffusion, which has been shaped gradually and unceasingly. Recently with the increasing cultural diffusion has been recognized a tendency of cultural imperialism owing to linguistic imperialism. Linguistic imperialism is a kind of linguicism which can be defined as the promulgation of global ideologies though the world wide expansion of one language. As English is spreading rapidly as a world language, some countries have adopted special language policy to protect the purity of their languages. This is a kind of linguistic nationalism.

5. Books for further reading: Kramsch, Claire. 2000. Language and Culture. Shang Hai Foreign Language education Press.