Language is a Verbalized Culture - Essay Example

Language is a verbalized Culture For many years and counting, the relationship between language and culture has intriguedand fascinated many scholars, and still does up to date; many studies in the past have endeavored to either prove or disapprove the presumption that language does influence culture, and that the two are inevitably related. Still, there is yet to be consensus on this point, as scholars have expressed diverse opinions on the matter, giving forth two distinct schools of thought in the language and culture discourses—those who support that language can, and does shape the culture of a people, and those who refute the proposition. The opponents of this motion have often contested that language merely does express thoughts and has nothing to do with culture, while the proponents have counteracted that opposition saying that in fact, the structures in language do shape the very thoughts we express by our language, thus, language does shape our cultures in the process. This paper sets out to lend credence to the motion by proposing that since language does influence our thoughts, viewpoints, and experiences in life, and these factors are what informs our culture, then language inevitably does shape our culture indirectly. Unlike animals and other creatures, only human beings have the distinctive ability to create and to use language for communication purposes; human language has a functional purpose in the human race, since it has the capacity to recreate both simple and complex thought patterns and experiences in words. In this respect, human language is a very fundamental tool in the creation and transmission of culture, and without it, human culture would probably not exist at all. Human language maintains human relationships in the social context, and does help in the communication of new ideas and abstract concepts, which end up revolutionizing the human experience in society, thereby shaping culture accordingly. Anthropologists have long been engrossed with cultures of different people all over the world, and they have always found it necessary to understand a people’s culture first, before attempting to understand their culture since language does reflect a people’s way of thinking. Besides language acting as a medium for transmitting and preserving culture for future generations, the language of any culture does reflect what the people who speak it value most i.e. their interests and their concerns, and much more. In that respect, different languages will emphasize only the things that are valued in the specific cultures that are concerned; cultural emphasis in this case implies that languages will only bear a vocabulary underscores the crucial words that are important for cultural adaptation. The many different languages in the world today differ, largely not in what they may enable their speakers to convey, rather in what they compel their speakers to convey; in other words, different languages have a profound impact on their speakers’ minds. However, languages influence their speakers’ minds not because they only allow them to think about certain things and not others, but because these languages compel their speakers to think about certain things more often than the rest. For instance, whereas the grammar of languages like French and German compel their speakers to disclose some information they may or may not be willing to state, such as the sex of the subject, the English language does not. English, on the other hand, does compel its speakers to specify some certain types of information such as time, which speakers of other languages may simply leave to context; in Chinese, however, you do not have to specify time of an action since the language has one verb for all states, present, past, or future. In the contexts stated above, it emerges that different languages are unique in what they habitually compel their speakers to think about; for instance, whereas the English language compels its speakers to state the time of an action Chinese speakers are not compelled to do so. Similarly, while languages such as German and French constantly demand that their speakers think of and always remember to state the sexes of their subjects in constructions, English does not impose such demands on its speakers, and they may include or leave out those details at will. In that respect, because languages routinely oblige individuals to specify certain types of information, they inevitably impose individuals to be attentive to certain details of the world and aspects of experience that may not be relevant or so crucial to speakers of other languages. Habits of speech in every language are inculcated in individuals as they constantly interact with their language in their daily lives, thus, becoming standard norms that of manner and behavior by influencing the minds of individuals, their experiences, perceptions, as well as what they feel and their viewpoints of the world accordingly. The fact that different languages do determine what individuals think about more often, thereby, to some considerable extent influencing their thought process, implies that language has a powerful influence in what is considered important in different cultures. Language is the vehicle of the socialization process, enabling people to relate with each other, and specifying how relationships in social groupings work and how individuals relate to one another respectively. In that respect, language does influence how we live and interact with another since it defines social relationships and the subtle but most fundamental aspects of manners that govern our interactions in those groups. Since language determines what individuals pay attention to most of the time, it inevitably determines how people react to different experiences and details in their environment; this means different cultures pay attention to different values and interests. What is important to the speakers of a particular language in one culture may not mean so much or anything at all to the speakers of another language in a different culture. Classical American Anthropology understood culture to be the human capacity to classify and represent their everyday experiences as well as creativity, or the different ways in which people that lived in different spaces classified and expressed their experiences and creativity. This brings a whole new dimension to culture, as an integrated system of acquired behavior patterns that define members of different groupings or societies; the material culture originated by different communities reflect their distinct belief and value systems, which their languages help to build. In that respect, language verbalizes the culture of a people, besides maintaining and conveying it; different languages reveal that different cultures have different categories that their speakers use to express their thoughts, hence it is only natural to conclude that language does determine how individuals think about certain things and aspects of life. If language makes us think more seriously about certain issues more than others by developing categories and structures that explicitly define those things then it is understood that that language does emphasize certain experiences, hence influencing how we experience those things accordingly. Languages that possess grammatical gender such as French and German, which have numerous inanimate yet gendered nouns, do influence how their speakers feel and associate with objects around them; for instance, a German bridge, clock, apartment, fork, violin, the sun, and love, among other things are female but masculine in Spanish. Usually, the Germans associate these objects with more feminine features such as slenderness and elegance while the Spanish, on the other hand, view them as more manly features like strength; this shows that languages have a powerful influence on how their speakers experience and relate to objects in their environment. In that case, it is naturally understood that speakers of different languages, due to the distinctness in their language structures and unique parameters, will form different associations with the different objects in their environments, thereby influencing cultural views accordingly. For the purposes of impartiality in this argument, we shall consider the alternative argument, that language and culture are related but language does not shape culture in any way, as argued by the second school of thought. The father of modern linguistics Noam Chomsky and his army of linguistic followers advance the argument that languages do have a universal grammar, whose basic phrase structure is the kernel sentence, and that their differences though vast, are not so significant and are negligible. The opponents to the language and culture debate have capitalized on this point to content that language differences are insignificant given the universal language structure, thus, cannot influence culture in any way. Noam Chomsky refutes that language is acquired in the socialization process, by proposing that every individual is born with an innate capacity to assemble words into sentences, and that language is too complex yet children acquire it with such ease that it cannot be merely equated to an acquired skill such as bike riding. The ball of the argument in this case appears that since language is innate and has a universal grammar, its physical differences are do not imply any differences in how individuals think and perceive their environment, or their culture. However, in as much as language may not determine the way in which people who speak different languages think, it does have a significant influence on what they think about more often, thereby gradually shaping their perspectives, viewpoints, and experiences of the details of their environment and how they feel about certain things in general. In that respect, it is obvious that language indeed does influence culture because it shapes what we think about more often, which reflects our evolved value and belief systems. In conclusion, since language does influence our thoughts, viewpoints, and experiences in life, and these factors are what informs our culture, then language inevitably does shape our culture indirectly. There is no doubt that language and culture are inevitably intertwined with each contributing to the other in a mutual symbiotic fashion; culture does draw its material from language, thus, language is the verbalized culture. Language influences not the ways in which we think, but what we do think about more often, consequently shaping peoples’ entire thoughts, their experiences, perceptions, as well as what they feel and their viewpoints of the world accordingly. The fact that language often does oblige individuals to be specific concerning certain types of information implies that it inevitably forces them to be attentive to certain details of the world and aspects of experience that may not be relevant or so crucial to speakers of other languages. The implication to these habits of speech in every language for culture is that they are inculcated in individuals mindsets and lives as standard cultural norms of manners and/or behavior; eventually, language shapes culture by influencing the thinking of individuals, their experiences, perceptions, as well as what they feel and their viewpoints of the world accordingly. Read More