CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

List of Contents
Page List of contents Introduction Definition of Culture Definition of Language i 1 2-3 4 5-6 7-8 9

Relationship between Culture and Language Different aspects of Culture Reference

INTRODUCTION
1. Background The need for cross-cultural understanding arises whenever people from different languages and cultures come into contact. With increased tourism, international business, students studying overseas and so on, there is concern to foster better communications among different cultural groups, but before we examines about variation in patterns of communication among cultural groups first of all we need to know about the meaning of culture itself and because culture allows to express itself in various ways such as through the use of language, therefore this paper will discuss the definition, relationship, and the aspects about culture and language which is common in communication system.

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Identification Definition of culture Definition of language The relationship between culture and language Visible features of culture Invisible aspects of culture

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Demarcation Because of the limit of time and ability that the writes have, so that the topic in this paper is limited to the definition of culture and language, the relationship between culture and language and the visible and invisible aspects of culture.

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Formulating Pay attention to the background, identification and demarcation of the topic.

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Heading According to the formulating, this paper is heading to describe them and make the readers know the definition and the relationship of culture and language.

DEFINITION OF CULTURE
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Culture which originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind is a modern concept based on a term first used in classical antiquity by the roman orator, Cicero in the 18th-century. In the 19th-century, the term developed to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspiration or ideals. In the mid 19th-century, some scientists used the term culture to refer to a universal human capacity. In the 20th-century culture emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. Specifically, culture in American anthropology had two meanings; 1. The evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively. 2. The distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively Culture is defined by anthropologists in a variety of ways. The definition usually includes some notion of shared values, beliefs, expectations, customs, jargon, and rituals. English anthropologist, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor In his works Primitive Culture provides an all-inclusive definition which is one of his most widely recognized contributions to anthropology and the study of religion: Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. And at the end of Primitive Culture, Tylor writes, The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science. Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tylor asserts that the human mind and its capabilities are the same globally, despite a particular societys stage in social evolution. Society may include a number of cultures and all cultures comprise different components that are necessary for members of society to competently participate in social life and interactions, such as; 1. SYMBOLS: It refers to an object, gesture, sound, color or design that represents something other than itself. 2. VALUES: Abstract concepts of what is important and worthwhile, they are general ideas that individuals share about what is good or bad. 3. NORMS: These are the guidelines people are supposed to follow in their relation with one another & they indicate the standard of propriety, morality, legality, and ethics of a society that are covered by sanctions when violations are made.

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BELIEFS: The things members of a culture hold to be true. They are the "facts" accepted by all or most members. Beliefs are not limited to religious statements, but include all the things a people know and accept as true, including common sense everyday knowledge.

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LANGUAGE: Language is a set of symbols used to assign and communicate meaning. It enables us to name or label the things in our world so we can think and communicate about them. Today in the United States as in other countries populated largely by immigrants, the

culture is influenced by the many group of people that now make up the country, its because all culture have at least five characteristics in common to passed on; 1. Culture is learned: Since culture is non-instinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one, it is learned through socialization. The new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations. 2. Culture is shared: The culture is shared by the social interaction may take in many forms to transmit the beliefs, values and expectation of the human society. The exchange of social ideas may provide understanding and learning the human culture and tradition. If it is commonly shared and believed by a group of individuals then it can be considered as their culture. 3. Culture is change: Not all cultures accumulate. There is knowledge; thoughts or traditions that are lost as new cultural traits are added, with that there are possibilities of cultural changes with the particular culture through time. 4. Culture is patterned / integrated: The culture is patterned by specific dimension of social life such as the economic and political activities. Members of the certain society act in a fairly uniform manner because they share mutual beliefs, customs and way of doing. It involves how an activity should be conducted. 5. Culture is adaptive: The cultural adaptation is the evolutionary process that modifies the social life of the people in the given natural environment. Technology generally reflects features of environment. And when the masses do adopt the cultural patterns of other societies discarding their existing patterns it is called cultural diffusion. The process of cultural diffusion is neither positive nor negative for any society, it depends how much the masses are ready to bring change in their ongoing cultural patterns.

DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE
There are many definitions of language but the main point of all those definitions is that language is system of communication. We have been learning about the thinking of others by reading, expressing our own thinking through writing and exchanging ideas with others by speaking and listening using a language. Means language is a powerful tool we have been using to understanding and develop our thinking. With its power to represent your thoughts, feelings, and experiences symbolically, language is the most important tool your thinking process has. Meanwhile Steven Pinker the Author of The Language Instinct sees language as an ability unique to humans, produced by evolution to solve the specific problem of communication. According to him language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. Languages evolve and diversify over time. The origins of human language will perhaps remain for ever obscure. By contrast the origin of individual languages has been the subject of very precise study over the past two centuries. There are about 5000 languages spoken in the world today, but scholars group them together into relatively few families probably less than twenty. Languages are linked to each other by shared words or sounds or grammatical constructions. The theory is that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been spoken in surprisingly recent times - as little as a few thousand years ago. Today, there are numerous hypotheses about how, why, when, and where language might have emerged. It might seem than there is hardly more agreement today than there was a hundred years ago when Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection provoked a rash of armchair speculations on the topic. Human language is unique because it has the properties of productivity, recursivity, and displacement, and because it relies entirely on social convention and learning. Its complex structure therefore affords a much wider range of possible expressions and uses than any known system of animal communication.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

Some authors claim that language is culture. It is generally agreed that language and culture are closely related. Language can be viewed as a verbal expression of culture meantime culture is the idea, custom and beliefs of a community with a distinct language containing semantics - everything a speakers can think about and every way they have of thinking about things as medium of communication. However, the relationship between language and culture is more complicated than the relationship of a part and the whole. When you learn a new language, you also learn much about a new culture it is because a language tells us much about the culture in which a particular language is used. Though cultures partly exist through language but culture is more than language. Still, when a language dies concepts belonging to that culture die with it. Language provides us with many of the categories we use for expression of our thoughts, so it is therefore natural to assume that our thinking is influenced by the language which we use. The use of language is deeply entrenched in human culture. In linguistics (the scientific study of language), the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language. The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf. A seminar work on the study of speech and language, Edward Sapirs book guided generations of linguists and literacy experts. He states: Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression in that society. In this excerpt, Sapir discusses the societal and cultural role in shaping language and the dynamics of language change and differentiation. Language is an important part of culture. A culture must have at least one language, which it uses as a distinct medium of communication to conveys its defining ideas, customs, beliefs, et al., from one member of the culture to another member. Cultures can develop multiple languages, or "borrow" languages from other cultures to use; not all such languages are co-equal in the culture. One of the major defining characteristics of a culture is which language(s) are the primary means of communication in that culture; sociologists and anthropologists draw lines between similar cultures heavily based on the prevalent language usage.
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"Culture expressing itself in sound" The language you learnt your first words in, the language your mother and father talked to you, the language which was used in your nearest surroundings and the language you use with your closest family and friends will always be a part of your identity as a person. Human use language as a way of signaling identity with one cultural group and difference from others, it gives individuals and groups their identity. Even among speaker of one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroup within a larger culture. Languages do not differ only in pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar, but also through having different cultures of speaking. However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or division. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways man and woman speak, between age group, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of "social deixis," or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy," "Doctor," or "Your Honor," but in other languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in several languages of east Asia, such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest. Finally, languages are not solely defined by their developing culture(s) - most modern languages are amalgamations of other prior and current languages. That is, most languages borrow words and phrases ("loan words") from other existing languages to describe new ideas and concept. In fact, in the modern very-connected world, once one language manufactures a new word to describe something, there is a very strong tendency for other languages to "steal" that word directly, rather than manufacture a unique one itself. The English language is a stellar example of a "thief" language - by some accounts, over 60% of the English language is of foreign origin which means imported from another language. Conversely, English is currently the world's largest "donor" language, with vast quantities of English words being imported directly into virtually all other language.
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DIFFERENT ASPECT OF CULTURE

In 1976, Edward T. Hall suggested that culture was similar to an iceberg. He proposed that only about 10% of culture (external or surface culture) is easily visible; the majority or 90% of culture (internal or deep culture) is hidden below the surface. For example, a small percentage of what we see on the surface represents those things about a persons culture that we can see such as: Facial expressions Religious rituals Art Holiday customs Gestures Foods Eating habits Music Literature Style of dress, etc However, most of what we dont see the unspoken and unconscious aspects is what affects how we view and conduct ourselves, and communicate with others. For example: Values Concept of beauty Concept of fairness Child raising beliefs Understanding of the natural world Religious beliefs Importance of time Concept of leadership Nature of friendship General world view, etc We are not as aware of things beneath the surface of the water like preference for competition or cooperation, how status is determined, or what makes a logical argument, a successful student, or a good friend.
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VISIBLE FEATUREAS OF CULTURE (Observable)

INVISIBLE ASPECTS OF CULTURE (Non-Observable)

When one first enters into another culture, one is usually first interacting only with the top 10% - literally, the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes, people make assumptions or develop ideas about another culture community without really understanding the internal or deep culture that makes up the majority of the cultures values and beliefs. These items, called cultural building blocks, make up our culture. Our culture impacts how we communicate with others and how we understand their communications with us.

REFERENCE
John R. Baldwin (2011), Defining Culture, http://my.ilstu.edu/~jrbaldw/ Prof. Emilita Kempis (2011), Managing Across Culture, http://www.docstoc.com
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Terai (2008), Culture, http://www.slideshare.net Wikipedia (2013), Language, http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia (2013), Culture , http://en.wikipedia.org Zaid Ali Alsagoff (2007), Modul 5: Language, http://www.slideshare.net