Culture as Reflected in Language

Soirsce Kastner

CULTURE AS REFLECTED IN LANGUAGE

From culture flows language. However, without language there can be little complex communication, and without complex communication there can be no story, poetry, song, science, history or law. These together, and more, are what constitute culture in a society.

There are thousands of ways of expressing thought through language, and millions of different words. Raymond G. Gordon (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th ed. 2005) states that there are currently over 6,912 languages in existence across the globe.

In order to effectively learn a new language one must simultaneously study the culture associated with that language. Without an understanding of the culture, many sayings and expressions are unclear, confusing or meaningless.

For example, if a native English speaker were to say “break a leg” or “heads up” to a foreigner with little awareness of English culture, either phrase would likely confuse or even insult. Even when a word translates literally from one language to another, cultural reference has a profound impact on the contextual use and it is impossible to translate complex ideas in the absence of an awareness of cultural nuance. Therefore, without cultural familiarity, many words, phrases and ideas become untranslatable.

S. Cheng (Comparing Eastern and Western Ways of Thinking) says that European thought processes tend to have more “analytic, differentiated and dichotomous cognitive styles,” whereas Asian thought processes tend to be more “synthetic, contextual and holistic.” Cheng describes the western thought process as “directed thinking” and the Eastern thought process as “total thinking”.

Siew Fang Law and David Peter Leonard (RMIT University and Dispute Settlement Centre Victoria, Department of Justice) write, “It is arguable that culture and language not only bring meaning to the world, they shape one’s cognitive processes, such as perception, interpretation and judgment.” They also write, “Language as a structure of meaning-giving, of reality-creation, of logic, is composed of words, sentences, punctuation, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, grammar etc. That is what communication is based upon to describe an incident and to explain one’s emotions, needs, interests and fears.”

The different ways in which people refer to things is an important measure of worldview. Every language emphasizes or deemphasizes different aspects of the surrounding world based on things, ideas and relationships that are important to that culture, thus affecting the way people think and talk about their world.

For instance, in Chinese culture there is a huge emphasis on family. This general mindset became even more widespread when Confucianism came into popularity, which places a high value on family. Subsequently, in the Chinese Mandarin language, there are 53 different names for relatives based on placement in the family tree. Another reason for this extensive relationship-based reference structure is the limited number of surnames included in Mandarin Chinese society. In a society that uses only about one hundred different surnames, describing individuals according to relationship becomes an important means of avoiding confusion.

Shaorong Huang and Wenshan Jia (The Cultural Connotations and Communicative Functions of Chinese Kinship Terms) write, “It seems that the English language pays little attention to the differences between consanguineal and affinal relations in its kinship terms. But the Chinese language considers these relations seriously.”

Mandarin Chinese has an interesting way of describing family relationships. In Mandarin Chinese, a person’s grandfather and grandmother on their father’s side are, respectively, referred to as “zu fu” and “zu mu”, which are translated as “father’s father” and “father’s mother”. On the mother’s side, the grandparents are referred to with the same name except the word “wai” is added in prefix. The word “wai” is translated literally as “outside”; therefore, “wai zu fu” and “wai zu mu” mean “outside grandfather” and “outside grandmother”.

This is because, in traditional Chinese culture, when a woman married she went to live with the family of her new husband, taking care of her husband’s parents along with any children she and her husband might produce. Every married woman was essentially an “outsider” in her new family. The weight placed upon specifically indicating the relationship structure and use of the descriptive term “outsider” tells us a great deal about social attitudes toward gender, family and relationships in traditional Chinese culture.

Most Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese use characters and symbols instead of an alphabet-based writing system. “Researches using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) (e.g., Chee et al, 1999; Chen et al., 2000) found that the left hemisphere was activated when reading English and Chinese, but [the] right hemisphere was activated [only] while reading Chinese as it demands intensive visual-spatial analysis.”

This affects the degree to which native speakers of Asian languages rely on visual cognitive processes, compared to native speakers of European languages or languages that use an alphabet-based writing system. According to Siew Fang Law and David Peter Leonard, “[Asian] languages are considered by many to be highly metaphorical, holistic, circular, indirect and symbolic. The Arabic write from right to left. That results in different cognitive processing of information and logic. Visual working memory does not appear to play a significant role in routine English language processing other than through imagery.” [The bracketed noun replaces These in the original.]

Siew Fang Law and David Peter also write:

In the past two decades, the field of cognitive linguistics has demonstrated that language does influence how people think, feel, reason and communicate in everyday life (Yu, 2003). Many abstract concepts are inherently structured, to varying degrees by language and metaphors arising from recurring embodied experience in the physical and cultural world. In their famous Linguistic Relativity Theory, the prominent linguists Sapir-Whoft have suggested that ‘those who are monolingual, bilingual or multilingual see the world differently’. This is because people create words to describe things or concepts that are significant in their environment. For example, there are eight words for coffee beans in the Brazilian language, twenty-five words for snow in the Inuit language for the Eskimos.

According to Sapir-Whorf’s theory, ‘The pattern of thought may have to do with immediate perception and attention, with personal and social cultural systems of classification, inference, and memory, or with aesthetic judgement and creativity. The reality may be the world of everyday experience, of specialized contexts or of ideational tradition. These three key elements are linked by two relations: language embodies an interpretation of reality and language can influence thought about that reality. The interpretation arises from the selection of substantive aspects of experience and their formal arrangement in the verbal code. Such selection and arrangement is, of course, necessary for language, so the crucial emphasis here is that each language involves a particular interpretation, not a common, universal one. An influence on thought ensues when the particular language interpretation guides or supports cognitive activity and hence the beliefs and behaviours dependent on it.’ (Lucy, 1997, p. 294).

Arguably, the most meaningful multi-dimensional yardstick by which to measure a culture is its language. A language may be linear and logical, thus reflecting the mind and manner of the culture from which it emerged, or perhaps it may be poetic and replete with images- again, reflecting a way of thinking and living. Culture and language are intrinsically enmeshed. To be authentically intimate with a language is to be intimate with its culture.

Works Cited

Cheng, S. “Comparing Eastern and Western Ways of Thinking.” Migration Monitor 1991:

7. 13 Dec. 2007

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Fifteenth edition.

2005. 10 Dec. 2007.

Huang, Shaorong. Jia, Wenshan. The Cultural Connotations and Communicative

Functions of Chinese Kinship Terms. No publishing date. 11 Dec. 2007

Lucy, J. A. “Linguistic relativism”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26, 291-312. 1997. 11

Dec. 2007

Siew, Fang Law. Leonard, David Peter. RMIT University and Dispute Settlement Centre

Victoria, Department of Justice. 2007. 11 Dec. 2007.

Zsoldos, Les. Helium ”Language and culture affect meanings of words.” 2007. 11 Dec. 2007

Works Consulted

Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary (2000), edited by Pearsall Judy (10th Ed). New York: Oxford

University Press.

Wikipedia.org - Guinness Book of World Records (2005)