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8.6 Language and culture

　 It is commonsense that language is the principal means by which our social lives are conducted. It has been shown in the previous chapter and this chapter that when language is used in contexts it is bound up with culture in complex ways. The relation between language and culture is an interesting and important topic in sociolinguistics. But before we discuss their relation we need to explore the concept of culture.

　 The word culture has hundreds of definitions. The key to the understanding of the essence of culture is the contrast between nature and culture. Nature is what is born and grows organically; culture refers to what has been cultivated by man. To understand the distinction you may ponder at the distinction between snow and snowman, or rose and love. Snow and rose are natural entities, while snowman and love symbolized by rose are products of culture. Some philosophers hold that man is the combination of nature and culture. Language as a product of man's social life is part of culture and the principal means by which culture is passed on from generation to generation. The question that has been explored by philosophers, anthropologists and linguists in the past two centuries is: to what extent are the world views and mental activities of members of a social group shaped by, or dependent on, the language they use? The theory that languages do affect the thought processes of their users has been called the theory of linguistic relativity (Kramsch 2000: 11). German scholars like Wilhelm Von Humbolt (1762-1835) first put forward the notion that different people speak differently because they think differently and that they think differently because their language offers them different ways of expressing the world around them. This notion was picked up by American linguists and anthropologists Franz Boas (1858-1942), Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) in their studies of American Indian languages. The view on the interdependence of language, culture and thought has been succinctly expressed by what is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The idea is stated by Whorf (1956: 212-14) as follows:

The background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds --- and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way --- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

　The hypothesis has been interpreted in two ways. One is known as determinism. In this view our language determines our thinking. This strong version has been rejected as it runs counter to the fact that peoples of different cultural backgrounds can understand each other. The other interpretation, known as relativism, has drawn more attention in the late 1990s. This view holds that culture affects the way we think through language, especially in our classification of the experienced world (Gumperz and Levinson 1996). Our experienced world includes the physical world (the globe), the social world (the community we are in) and the ideological world (the set of values and attitudes that strongly influence the way we behave). The language we speak codifies all the three aspects of our experienced world. Between different cultures there are significant differences in the three worlds. Underlying different languages are distinctive categorizations of experience. Kinship terms in different languages, for example, reflect different ways to categorize blood and marriage relations. In Chinese there are two sets of terms distinguishing relatives on the father's side and those on the mother's side (叔叔, 伯伯, 姑姑, 堂兄弟姐妹, 及舅舅, 姨姨, 姑表兄弟姐妹, 姨表兄弟姐妹, 等等). For native speakers of Chinese, these terms allow a clear distinction of the relation, which is more salient for them in thinking about the relations. In contrast, there are no exactly equivalent terms in English. Therefore, native English speakers do not see the distinction between one's father's brother and mother's brother as significant. Consequently, the word uncle does not sound adequately informative to a Chinese speaker of English in understanding the relation between the person mentioned and the person he/she is talking to. This kind of effect upon thinking is also proved by experiments. Kramsch (2000) reports the result of an experiment. Navajo children speak a language that encodes the action of ‘picking up a round object’ (a ball, for instance) and ‘picking up a long, thin, flexible object’ (such as a rope) with different verbs. When presented with a blue rope, a yellow rope, and a blue stick, and asked to choose which object goes best with the blue rope, most monolingual Navajo children chose the yellow rope, thus associating the objects on the basis of their physical form, whereas monolingual English-speaking children chose the blue stick, associating the object on the basis of their color. An oft-cited example to show that language codifies experienced world rather than world in its abstract sense is the fact that the language of Eskimos has seven words for different types of snow but there is not a single word equivalent to snow. All these support the idea of relativism. Speakers of different languages may not share the same way of viewing and interpreting experienced world. Nevertheless, they have the same cognitive capacity, which makes intercultural communication possible.