Bruno

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Bruno Ribeiro Braga
Professor Moeller
English 1301
7 October 2015

Are culture and language separable?

The essay called The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English, by the author

and linguist John McWhorter was published in World Affairs (Fall 2009), a bimonthly journal
devoted to conversations and debate about issues related to U.S. foreign policy. His first
arguement of the essay is that the culture and language are not entangled or meshed therefore,
if a language were to die a culture could survive without the original language. His second
argument is that when a language dies it is not cultural loss but an aesthetic loss. McWorthers
conclusions are that one universal language would help make mankind communicate better, and
it is just a historical coincidence that English is a Universal Language.

McWorthers main point is that language and culture are dissociable. He says that when

the culture dies, naturally the language dies along with it. For McWorther the reverse is not true,
if a language dies it does not necessarily mean the death of a culture. His example is that Native
Americans who do not speak their Native language are still capable of indigenous expression. I
disagree with him. In my point of view, a language is part of a culture and a culture is a part of a
language. Both, culture and language, are intricately interwoven so we can not separate them
without losing the significance of either language or culture. Simply stated culture and language
are inseparable. For example, if we take out a language from Amazonian tribe members, and
force them speak English suddenly, they will be confused and lack vocabulary from their culture.
Some words are only part of their culture and dont exist in other languages. Or the opposite is

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also true. If people in the city who are English speakers start to speak Pirah, a language from an
Amazonian tribe, they will have the same problem. Language is an expression of a way of life, in
other words, their culture. Every person care about their language as well as their culture. This is
true also for English speakers. Some Americans want to make English the official language of U.S.,
to protect English from other languages brought by immigrants from around the world.

The authors other argument is that the main loss when a language dies is not cultural

loss but aesthetical loss. I disagree. I think that it is not a matter of aesthetics why people want
to preserve their language. They want to preserve their language, because language has specific
functions and purposes. For example, clicking and whistling languages have a stealthy purpose
for hunters. These people are able to communicate without words to not alarm their prey.
Language is coded in our brains, and helps us to interpreting and understanding our community
and world at large.

My conclusion is that McWhorter tends to over simplify complex issues about culture and

language. I believe they are complicated and interconnected, and if we want to preserve a culture
we need to preserve both as a whole. The status quo among the majority of researchers and
academic professors in the areas of linguistics and other similar fields is that language is essential
for a culture to survive. And linguistics agree that language is not aesthetic but deeply entrenched
in processes of thought and communication.

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