Lecture 6Language and culture

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:o the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits

of a racial, religious, or social groupo the characteristic features of everyday existence

(such as diversions or a way of life) shared by peoplein a place or time

membership in a discourse community that shares acommon social space and history, and commonimaginings.

Language and culture were seen as separate language was since its inception the domain of

linguists, not anthropologists, The prestige of linguistics and the new technology

of the language laboratory encouraged anemphasis on language as skill, not as culturalunderstanding.

linguists and grammarians,following the path set bySaussure, studied language as aclosed system of signs sharedby all members of a communityof ideal native speakers.

On the other hand, culturalanthropologists like Lévi-Straussstudied culture as a closedsystem of relational structuresshared by homogeneous socialgroups in exotic primitivesocieties.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis revolves around the idea that language has power

and can control how you see the world. Language is a guide to your reality, structuring

your thoughts. It provides the framework throughwhich you make sense of the world.

Language dictates how we think. The vocabularyand grammar (structure) of a language determinesthe way we view the world (“worlds shaped bywords”).

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has two principles: Linguistic determinism: the language we use to

some extent determines the way in which we viewand think about the world around us.

Linguistic relativity: people who speak differentlanguages perceive and think about the worldquite differently from one another.

the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posited theconstructivist relation of language and thought andthe mutual dependency of linguistic forms andcultural worldviews was not taken seriously amongpsycholinguists, many of whom had studied underNoam Chomsky.

Culture was to make its way into appliedlinguistics through the study of language asdiscourse (studying language in contexts of use).

Culture was another name for context, i.e. theconstraints imposed on individual language usersby the forces of tradition, convention, fashion, andideology.

Culture in applied linguistics came to mean‘membership in a discourse community thatshares a common social space and history, andcommon imaginings’ (Kramsch 1998: 10).

beyond the standard linguistic system, culturemade it necessary to study linguistic and stylisticvariation, socially and historically situateddiscourse communities, different ways ofexercising symbolic power, and struggles forcultural recognition and legitimation.

culture was at first essentialized as the patrimonyof national or ethnic groups.

Nowadays, with the global spread of informationtechnologies and global migrations, culture haslost much of its national moorings.

Discourse analysis was hailed in the 1970s as thegolden road to understanding language in use.

Culture was to be found not in institutionalmonuments and artifacts, nor in artistic products,but in the meaning that speakers and listeners,writers and readers gave them through thediscourse of verbal exchanges, newspaper articlesor political speeches.

To understand culture, one had to understand boththe universal and the culture-specific constraintson language use in discourse: for example, howsocial actors initiate and end conversations, howthey manage or avoid topics, how they structurean argument and organize information, how theynegotiate meaning, how they relate text to context

Conversation Analysis found the construction ofthe social world in the systematics of turn-taking indaily conversations.

The detailed analysis of the mechanics of turns-at-talk opened up vistas on how culture getsproduced and reproduced through language.

Cross-cultural pragmatics studies therealization of speech acts like requestsand apologies in different culturalcontexts, as well as the culturalvariations of the Gricean cooperativeprinciple in conversation and ofpoliteness strategies.

This field of research studies theexchanges between interlocutors fromvarious cultural backgrounds, mostly inprofessional or institutional contexts,very often with unequal speaking rights.

Intercultural communication and interculturalcompetence among language learners, culturalgroups, and institutions

hermeneutic strands of European continentalphilosophy: intercultural education deals with thecultural identity of language learners, culturalstereotypes and the dialectic of Self and Other.

intercultural education considers its goals aspromoting tolerance, empathy, personaltransformation and cross-cultural understanding.

Intercultural communication and interculturalcompetence

in Europe, intercultural competence strives topromote tolerance and citizenship,

in the USA it focuses more on participation andcollaboration around common tasks for theempowerment of the individual

In Australia, intercultural learning has become themajor pedagogic objective for foreign languageeducators , with the more cosmopolitan goal ofpreparing citizens of the world who can act as abridge between East and West.

Discourse The term ‘discourse’ implies a relational,

decentered, multiperspectival, variable approachto culture that offers less certainties tobusinessmen, politicians and language teachers,who prefer to see in ‘culture’ something stable,predictable and controllable.

Discourse : Several developments have made adiscourse approach to culture more desirable inrecent years.

The increased importance given to symbolic formsof power – global information networks, round-the-clock media, mass marketing and thecommunication culture of fast capitalism, hasincreased the gap between the realities on theground and the discourses that give meaning tothese realities.

Economic globalization has exacerbated the clashbetween the discourse of a global market and thediscourse of local traditions and beliefs

The Internet and the networking culture on-line, withits blogs, electronic chatrooms and network siteslike Facebook and Twitter,

present a challenge to institutional authority and toestablished cultures.

offer an a-historical world of connections andrelations that replace quality with quantity, timewith space, reality with hyperreality.

In applied linguistic research: Most of the current issueswhich applied linguistic research has to grapple withcome from the applied and interdisciplinary nature of thefield, and the problems this presents for the study oflanguage and culture:

• (1) description vs prescription,• (2) description vs prediction,• (3) linguistic vs educational concerns,• (4) structuralist vs post-structuralist approaches to

research,• (5) who gets to frame real-world problems: the

practitioner or the researcher?

• (1) description vs prescription,

The expectation that the findings of researchers will lead toimmediate prescriptions for the practice.

o Businessmen expect from applied linguists prescriptions on how tobehave when negotiating deals with partners from other cultures,

o medical personnel expect to learn how to improve their bedsidemanners by tailoring their care to their patients’ ‘culture’,

o court translators expect to learn how to interpret and convey theintentions of their clients beyond the words uttered.

o The reason the US State Department is currently recruitinganthropologists to join the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan isprecisely because the US military needs to ‘know’ the culture of theenemy and hopes to get from these researchers guidelines on howto behave in order to befriend (or capture) local nationals.

• (2) description vs prediction,

• While language tests are supposed to predict future verbal behaviorin a variety of social contexts, very often their cultural content seemsto want to predict cultural assimilation, not merely linguistic ability.

• In many cases, language tests have been used to discriminateagainst ethnic groups in immigration situations.

• tests that purport to test linguistic abilities often test culturalallegiance and loyalty.

• Language tests raise the thorny issue of the relation of language andthought and how much cultural knowledge gate-keepers are entitledto require of potential immigrants to industrialized societies.

• (3) linguistic vs educational concerns,

• Doesn’t communicative competence already include the ability tonegotiate differences in assumptions, worldviews and discoursestyles that we call ‘culture’?

• Why should we specifically teach understanding and tolerance ofother cultures when communicative language teaching alreadyentails expressing, interpreting and negotiating meanings that mightbe very different from one culture to the other?

• (4) structuralist vs post-structuralist approaches toresearch,

• Applied linguists are called to play a political role.• Post-structuralist thinkers see culture as constructed in and through

discourse and emerging locally from verbal interactions in historicallycontingent contexts.

• Rather than focus on the multiple, changing and even conflictualnature of structures in the social world – males vs females, powerfulvs powerless, native vs non-native, it turns its attention away fromthe structures themselves and focuses instead on the conditions ofpossibility of certain structures rather than others emerging at certainpoints in time.

• (5) who gets to frame real-world problems: thepractitioner or the researcher?

• the nature of the ‘real-world’ problems that applied linguists aremeant to solve.

• How should these problems be framed? And who gets to framethem: the practitioners and politicians or the researchers?

• In applied linguistic practice

o language teachers are typically worried that they are not qualifiedto teach ‘culture’.

o language teachers don’t all agree that they should teach ‘meaning’beyond the meanings captured by grammars and dictionaries.

o The challenge is how to improve interaction: between doctors andpatients, lawyers and clients, corporate managers and consumersin a variety of cultural contexts, while furthering the interests of thecompany.

o the role of technology has to be mentioned in the creation of acyberculture that is increasingly shaping both language and cultureand transforming social life.

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