Chapter 7 Language, Culture and Society 7.1 Language and culture
1. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
What the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests is like this: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world. Following this argument, two important points could be captured in the theory. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking patterns; on the other hand, similarity between language is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. For this reason, this hypothesis has alternatively been referred to as linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. This hypothesis has two versions: a strong and a weak version. The strong version of the theory refers to the claim the original hypothesis suggests, emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version, however, is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture, and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical.
2. Context of situation
(1) The relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities: a. The verbal action of the participants b. The non-verbal action of the participants (2) The relevant objects
(3) The effects of the verbal action
3. Speech community: Speech community refers to a group of people who form a community, e.g. a village, a region, a nation, and who have at least one speech variety in common.
4. Gender difference: Gender difference is the difference in a speech between men and women. 5. Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity: Linguistic determinism is one of the two points in S-W hypothesis, i.e. language determines thought. Linguistic relativity is the other point: there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages.
6. Ethnography of communication: The study of place of language in culture and society. Language is not studied in isolation but within a social or cultural setting. Ethnography of communication studies, e.g. how people in a particular group or community communicate with each other and how the social relationships between these people affect the type of language they use.
7. Cross-cultural communication: An exchange of ideas, information, etc. between persons from different cultural backgrounds.
8. What are the aims of teaching culture in language class?
There are at least three objectives for us to teach culture in our class: (1) To get the students familiar with cultural differences;
(2) To help the students transcend their own culture and see things as the members
of the target culture will;
(3) To emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and culture through various classroom practices.
All this lead to a belief that a good understanding of structural things in some cases has much to do with a conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language from language learners. In other words, a successful master of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture, because language and culture are correlated with each other at different levels of linguistic structure.
7.2 Language and society
1. How many social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context?
The following social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context: (1) Class; (2) Gender; (3) Age;
(4) Ethnic identity;
(5) Education background; (6) Occupation;
(7) Religious belief.
2. What are the sociolinguistic study of society and the sociolinguistic study of language> If we want to know more about a given society or community by examining the linguistic behavior of its members, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of society. That is to say, we are doing sociolinguistics at a macro level of investigation. At this level of discussion things that we are interested in include bilingualism or multilingualism, language attitude, language choice, language maintenance and shift, language planning and standardization, vernacular language education, etc.
On the other hand, if we want to know more about some linguistic variations in language use by turning to potential socio-cultural factors for a description and explanation, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of language. Consequently, we are more interested in examining micro linguistic phenomena such as structural variants, address forms, gender differences, discourse analysis, Pidgin and Creole languages, and other more language-related issues.
3. What are vernacular, Pidgin and Creole?
Vernacular refers to the native language of a country, not of a foreign origin or learned formation; or the indigenous language or dialect of a region.
Pidgin is a mixed or blended language used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. Pidgins arose as a result of mixing two languages such as a Chinese dialect and English, an African dialect and French, etc. Creole is a pidgin that has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquired by the children of that community as their native language. 4. What is discourse analysis?
Discourse analysis refers to the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversation, interviews, etc. Analysis of spoken discourse is sometimes called conversational analysis. Some linguistics use the term text linguistics for the study of written discourse. Recent analyses have been carried out on discourse in the classroom. Such analyses can be useful in finding out bout the effectiveness of teaching methods and the types of teacher-student relationships.
5. What are bilingualism, diglossia, and multilingualism?
Bilingualism refers to the use of at least two languages either by an individual or by a group of speakers, such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Bilingualism is common in the province of Quebec in Canada where both English and French are spoken, and parts of Wales, where both Welsh and English are spoken. When two languages or language varieties exist side by side in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, one is a more standard variety called the high variety, which is sued in government, the media, education, and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety called the low variety, which is used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.
Multilingualism refers to the use of three or more languages by an individual or by a group of speakers such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Multilingualism is common in Malaysia, Singapore, Israel, etc.
Chapter 7 Language
