Language Or Culture Essay Research Paper Whether

Language Or Culture Essay, Research Paper

Whether realized or not, it is obvious that wherever the concept of language occurs, the concept of culture occurs. That is mainly because language is deeply embedded in culture. Although some people think that this statement is wrong due to the fact that a language is the key to the cultural heritage of another people or that knovledge of another language enables people to increase their personal culture through contact with great minds and works of literature, the culture of a society includes all aspects of shared life in a community. For example, children who grow up in a social group learn ways of doing things, ways of expressing themselves, ways of looking at things, etc. Therefore a language is also learned and used in such a context, drawing from the culture.

For a better understanding of the deep relationship between language and culture, it would be worth trying to look through the denotations of culture first. For many people, when they are asked to make a definition of culture, culture is a way of life. It is the context in which they exist, think, feel and speak by using the language. It is the glue that sticks people together. Therefore, culture guides the behaviour of people in a society because it includes the ideas, customs, skills and tools such as language for a community. As a result, we can count the aspects of culture as follows:

+ Culture facilitates human interactions.

+ Culture satisfies basic human needs such as speaking.

+ Culture has an effective power of gathering people under an umbrella.

+ Culture tends to form a consistent structure in a society.

+ Culture is, like language, learned and shared by all the members of a society.

+ Culture is transmitted to new generations with the help of language.

As can easily be seen, the term culture has a lot of things in common with the term language . Culture is also an integral part of the interaction between language and thought. For example, Cultural patterns, customs, and ways of life are all expressed with the help of language. More specifically, cultures have different ways of expressing the colors of things, or whereas many african societies have no word for snow, people from Russia have many different expressions for the same word.

With these remarks on the relationship of language and culture the classic question of does language reflect a cultural world view or does language actually shape the world view. Comes to our minds. Since many linguists, sociologists and other scholars have all been trying to find and have not yet found — a clear-cut answer for this question, it would be a respectless attitude trying to find a certain answer for tis disputable question. However, we can surely state that language is the medium through which people express their experiences and their ideas of the world in which they live, and that s why language carries a cultural aspect with itself. Native speakers who grow up in a particular culture or who share experiences in the culture are all aware of differences in meaning which gestures, words or expressions show. The various ways of expressing you in many languages depends on the culture of the speakers of that language, for instance.

As it is mentioned above a native language is learned along with the ways and attitudes of of the social group, and these ways and attitudes find expression through the language. In this way, the language si an integral part of the functioning social system. Since members of a cultural group have had similar experiences, the meaning of a word is shared by them all, but it may differ in some places from the meaning this word has for other groups. It is because of this interrelationship of language and culture that one-to-one equivalences can hardly be established between words and expressionsin two languages.

What is more, although words seem to correspond in meaning in their denotation, they can be different in their connotation or in the emotional associations. Even such a universal concept as mother may have strong emotional feelings whereas it has no important effect in the societies in which children are regarded as belonging to the tribe or clan rather than their individual parents. Cultural patterning may also lead to expectations of different emotional reactions from various sections of a social group. For example, in some societies men and women are expected to react differently to seeing a spider. The word for communism should be easily identifiable in many languages but the full meaning, denotational or connotational, can be poor when you try to translate it from one language to another. That is because, the misunderstanding can be prevented when the word is considered in context-that is the understanding of both of the languages culture.

Because a large part of the meaning of words can be understood correctly with the help of an evaluation technique such as good-bad; right-wrong or acceptable-unacceptable , we must be aware of these cultural differences to get the real meaning of the expressions in a language. In addition, Since the value judgements are learned in the culture in which a person grow up, a person must be aware of the values and attitudes of the group he or she is interacting with.

As for the useful sides of learning the culture of the language, we c