Language and Culture
Since culture is defined succinctly as ―the totality of beliefs and practices of a society,‖ nothing is of greater strategic importance than the language through which its beliefs are expressed and transmitted and by which most interaction of its members takes place.
The relation between language and culture would not constitute such serious difficulties for cross-cultural understanding if it were not for the numerous misconceptions about language and its function within a society. Perhaps the most serious misconception is the idea that each language more or less controls the way people think, sometimes expressed as ―We think the way we think because we talk the way we talk.‖ It is true that the particular structures of a language (sounds, lexemes, syntax, and discourse patterns) may reflect to a certain degree the way people think and they may be said to form ―the ruts or paths for thinking,‖ but they do not determine what or how people must think. Languages are too open-ended and human imagination is too creative to ever be rigidly ruled by the regulations of syntax or of any other feature of language. Some theologians and philosophers used to speak about the intuitive and particularizing mentality of the ―Hebrew mind‖ as portrayed in the Old Testament, and they contrasted this with the logical and generalizing mentality of the Greeks of classical times as revealed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. But the revived Hebrew language of today is certainly
no impediment to scientific thinking on the part of Israelis, and Greek was no obstacle to the inductive reasoning of the pre-Socratic philosophers nor did it later prevent Neoplatonists from using Greek to promote their philosophical ―flights of fantasy.‖
Some people have thought that each language is so distinct that there is no valid way in which the discourses of one language can be translated into another. But at least ninety percent of the fundamental structures of all language are quite similar, and language universals far outweigh the divergencies. All languages employ figurative expressions, have poetry, use language in singing, and have a great number of literary forms or genres – from genealogies to prayers. One language-culture may emphasize the development and use of particular genres, e.g. epic poetry or animal folktales, which another language culture may seldom employ and may even strongly reject. But the people of any language-culture have sufficient imagination and experience to understand how the people of another language-culture may rightly differ in their behavior and values, since the behavioral differences within a single culture are usually greater than those which exist between cultures.
The idea that some languages are far superior to other languages and that accordingly some cultures are far superior to other cultures is also a noted deterrent to understanding the relation between language and culture. When people speak about language superiority, they are usually talking about the literature which has been produced in such a language, or they evaluate the lexical and syntactic structures in terms of the ways these have been exploited by creative writers. The oral and written literatures of different languages can differ considerably in quality, but this is not the result of the formal structures of the language in question but of the ways in which the people of the society have invested creative talent in using the language as a medium for the production of valuable literary works. All languages have the potential for outstanding aesthetic expression. It is simply one of the ―accidents‖ of history which determines the emergence of literary genius. Some people, however, believe that some languages are fundamentally ugly, while others are intrinsically beautiful. In fact, most people insist that their own language belongs to the class of beautiful languages, even though it may have glottalized implosives, clicks that seem to pop and sputter, bilabial trills, and harsh guttural sounds. Phonological beauty is obviously in the ears of the hearer. Arabic, for example, is often cited as an acoustically unpleasant language in view of its various guttural consonants, but a number of Arab poets have succeeded in producing exquisite poems with rich sound patterns as acoustically sensuous and pleasing as occur in any language.
A language does reflect in certain aspects the culture of a society, but primarily in its optional features, i.e. in certain of its hierarchies of
language and culture
