Language and culture

According to the descriptive studies of sociolinguists, culture plays an indispensable role in the forming of our impression about language. Sociolinguists, along with anthropologists, have used language as a source of information in the general study of ‘culture’.

It is generally believed that culture is all of the ideas and general assumptions that we acquire when we grow up in a certain society. On the basis of these explanations, language and culture are inseparable ends of one line, where the latter plays as a pillar for the former.

According to the Spair-Whorf hypothesis, the entire linguistic understanding of each society differs from the other societies because of the grammatical and semantic distinctions. On the opposite of this hypothesis stand Cartesians, who believe in the idea of an international language, an idea suggested by the French philosopher René Descartes.

During the middle of twentieth century, two American linguists, who never worked as colleagues, introduced new theories about human understanding of languages on the basis of their culture. We grow up within a society, and, consequently, we construe the functions of languages with the influences of this culture. As an instance, also experimented by Whorf, some American native tribes consider clouds and stones as animate and living entities which carry spirits.

For an individual of such culture, who has deified clouds for many years, artificial impregnation of clouds can be inferred as an insult or even sacrilege. Contrary case is true as well, where a foreign student wants to study the language of aforementioned tribe.

For English students who study Deutsch academically, it may look peculiar to find out that words have been classified into three genders. The division is Feminine, Masculine and Neutral. It is evident that a genderless grammar will sound quite crude for Germans. To stretch the point a bit further, from semantic perspective, the word ‘snow’ has only one defined meaning for English speakers, while for Eskimos there are more than twenty kinds of snows with different lexicalized terminologies.

It was in the midst of 17th century, when the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes espoused the idea of inventing an international language for all the human beings, one that included all the people on the earth. He bulwarked his theory by saying that “language would have only one kind of conjugation, declension, and word structure. The changes in verb and word construction would have to be effected by affixes added to the beginning or end of the root word.” But to what extent this idea can be implementable? From the very beginning, this ideology raised squabbles among theoreticians, and most of them tried to stultify him. The problem was that Descartes never thought about Social Categories that affect individuals of each society. A simple example for this would be the word ‘uncle’, which in English has only two meaning (e.g. ‘parent’s brother’), But in many situations this simple word can be used for a much larger number of people, and Descartes probably was either incognizant of this fact or he had his justifications and solutions for it.

An international language is an idealistic term, but to attain such point, where there is only a unique language for all, human beings must meet a paradigm shift. Only a radical change, which seems improbable, can entail this ideal outcome.

The word culture is so vast that nobody can do away with it. In terms of studying, every subject is influenced by culture. It is necessary to coordinate the subjects of books, especially in the field of Language, with the pervading culture of the target country. Otherwise, cultural problems such as cultural alienation and culture shock will be inevitable.

Culture is the quintessence of individual’s life, and language is one ramification of it. Teaching a new language will be difficult, unless we reconcile language teaching methods and culture. Thus we can achieve the objective of an ideal language, which in no ways contradicts entrenched culture.