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Language and Culture in the Global Village Xu lisheng Zhejiang University. In intercultural communication studies, culture and language are often assumed to be intertwined. New words are coined to reflect this relation: languaculture (Agar, 1994),
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Language and Culture in the Global Village Xu lisheng Zhejiang University
In intercultural communication studies, culture and language are often assumed to be intertwined. • New words are coined to reflect this relation: languaculture (Agar, 1994), language-and-culture (Byram and Morgan, 1994). Language and culture are considered as two sides of the same coin. (P. R. Moran, 2001)
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 for their society… The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. (Edward Sapir,1929)
Every language is something more than a vehicle for exchanging ideas and information --- more even than a tool for self-expression and for letting off emotional steam or for getting other people to do what we want. Every language is also a special way of looking at the world and interpreting experience. (Clyde Kluckhohn,1965)
Language is taken to play a crucial role in the construction of the shared view of reality held by speakers of a common language in three interrelated ways --- • by naming aspects of the physical and social reality that are seen as significant in a particular culture; • through the ways of speaking that are characteristic of a particular culture; • through covert grammatical categories..
However, the world today is no longer the world in which people lived isolated from one another. • In the past century, particularly the last few decades, we have seen dramatic changes in human society and an enormous increase both in amount and in the quality and intensity of communication among people of different nations as people become increasingly mobile.
In the past most human beings were born, lived, and died within a limited geographical area, never encountering people of other cultural backgrounds. • Such an existence no longerprevails in the world. Even members of once isolated groups of people now frequently have contact with members of other cultural groups.
Today, it has become quite possible that many of us spend much of our lives in the company of those who still speak the same language as we do, but might seek different values, move at a different pace, and interact with us according to a different norm. • It is now more and more likely that we come into direct contact with others who do not share our basic assumptions and perspectives. Intercultural communication is well on its way to becoming an everyday phenomenon.
Linguistic and cultural boundaries become blurred. Speakers of the same language may find themselves separated by deep cultural gaps, while others who speak grammatically distinct languages may share the same culture.
Culture and language may not co-vary with one another any more. • Now we can hardly assume that language and culture are co-extensive. The assumption of a one to one relationship between language and cultural variability must be seen as not very well grounded.
The way the relationship between language and culture is viewed and investigated should be renovated. • It seems that the concern with language and culture should be more local than universal.
In today’s world, what is intertwined with culture may not be language itself, but the way in which language is used. • The differences in ways of speaking are profound and systematic. And these differences reflect different cultural values.
If there should be a one-to-one relationship, it would be the relationship between culture and what is usually called “discourse”. • In a sense, it is discourse, rather than language, that is so intertwined with culture that the two can hardly be separated, for discourse is actually where culture is constructed and reproduced through the use of language in a particular way.
If culture can be conceptualized as an abstract system of meanings shared by the members of a community, it is not necessarily shared by those who happen to speak a single grammatically homogeneous language, but will more probably shared by those of the same discourse community, a community that may not be geographically or socially bounded and its members may not even speak the same language.
