LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
INTRODUCTION
One of the discussions in Sociolinguistics is about the relationship between language and culture. It is about how the structure and meaning of certain language influence certain culture and how the effect of culture toward the use of language. That will be explained in detail using the Whorfian Hypothesis. Other items related to language and culture discussed which are discussed in this paper are color terminology, Kinship system, folk taxonomy, prototype theory, Taboo and Euphemism.
THE WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS
There are three claims concerning the relationship between Language and Culture:
1. Linguistic determinism is the strongest claim that states the Structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language view the world
2. Linguistic relativism is the weaker claim that states the culture of people finds reflection in the language they employ. People come to use their language in ways that reflect what they value and what they do. In this view cultural requirements do not determine the structure of a language, but they certainly influence how a language is used.
3. The weakest claim states that there is little or no relationship between language and culture. And that language only influences memory
The claim that states the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language view the world is mostly associated with the linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Today, the claim is usually referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Whorfian hypothesis
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the Whorfian hypothesis) is named after the two American linguists who first formulated it. They start from the view that we all have a basic need to make sense of the world. To make sense of it, we impose an order on it. The main tool we have for organizing the world is language. Their view is that the language we use determines how we experience the world and how we express that experience. Hence, their view is often referred to as linguistic determinism.
The hypothesis can be split into an extreme version, called linguistic determinism and a somewhat weaker version called linguistic relativism. Linguistic determinism states that our thinking and behavior causally depends on the structure of our language. Linguistic relativism postulates a relationship between language and thought, but rejects the idea that this relationship necessarily needs to be causal. People who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently (Metxmacher, 2007).
Sapir acknowledged the close relationship between language and culture, mainlining that they were inextricably related so that you could not understand or appreciate the one without knowledge of the other. He also states that people see, hear, and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose (to influence us to perceive the world in a particular way) certain choices of interpretation.
His student Whorf extended these ideas. He went much further than saying there was a ‘predisposition’; in Whorf’s view, the relationship between language and culture was a deterministic one (belief that everything is caused by something and that there is no real free will). In this view, different speakers will therefore experience the world differently insofar as the languages they speak differ structurally.
On several occasion Fishman (particularly 1960 and 1972) has written about the Whorfian hypothesis concerning the kinds of claims it makes. One claim is that, if speakers of one language have certain words to describe things and speakers of another language lack similar words, then speakers of the first language will find it easier to talk about those things. For example, physicians talk easily about medical phenomena, more easily than you or I, because they have vocabulary to do so.
A stronger claim is that, if one language makes distinction that another does not make, then those who use the first language will more readily perceive the differences in their environment. For example, Balinese has more than one terms as an equivalent ‘rice’ in English, they are ‘baas’, ‘nasi’, ‘aruan’. Balinese more readily perceive the distinction those three terms because their language provide those distinctions. While English speakers will see ‘rice’ as one term and never realize the differences between the cooked rice (nasi), the raw rice (baas) and the half-cooked rice (aruan) as Balinese do. This is because their language draws no attention toward those linguistics distinctions.
This extension into the area of grammar could be argued to be a further strengthening of Whorf’s claim, since classification system are to be connected with shape, substance, sex, number, time, and so on, and are both more subtle (more common) and more pervasive (presents everywhere). Their effect is much stronger on language users than vocabulary differences alone. The strongest claim of all is that the grammatical categories available in a particular language not only help the users of that language to perceive the world in a certain way but also at the same time limit such perception. This means, your language controls your ‘world-view’— you only perceive what your language allows you, or predisposes you to perceive. Speakers of different language will, therefore, have different world-view.
Whorf contrasted the linguistic structure of Hopi with the kinds of linguistic structure he associated with languages such as English, French, German, and so on, that is, familiar European languages. He saw these languages as sharing so many structural features that he named this whole group of languages Standard Average European (SAE). According to Whorf, Hopi grammatical categories provide a ‘process’ orientation toward the world, whereas the categories in SAE give SAE speakers a fix orientation toward time and space so that they do not only ‘objectify’ reality in certain ways but even distinguish between things that must be counted, e.g. pens, tables, trees, and those that need not be counted, e.g. water, sugar, milk. In SAE events occur, have occurred, or will occur in a definite time, i.e. present, past and future; to speakers of Hopi, what is important is whether an event can be warranted to occur, or to be expected to occur. Whorf believed that these differences lead speakers of Hopi and SAE to view the world differently. The Hopi sees the world as essentially an on going set of processes; objects and events are not discrete and countable; and time is not apportioned into fixed segments so certain things recur, e.g. mornings, days, and minutes. In contrast, speakers of SAE regard nearly everything in their world as discrete, measurable, countable and recurrent. The different languages have different obligatory grammatical categories so that every time a speaker of Hopi or SAE says something, she or he makes certain observation about how the world is structured because of the structure of the language each speak.
Another example can be seen from the Indonesian linguistic structure. Indonesian as Hopi has no fix orientation toward time, countable nouns and uncountable nouns. Indonesian grammatical categories, however, provide ‘the doer’ and sometimes the ‘manner’ of certain action. As, in the following sentences:
Anak itu mandi = The child is taking a bath (the subject does the action by himself and for himself which is indicated by the used of the basic verb)
Ibu itu memandikan anaknya = The mother is giving a bath to her son (the subject does the action in the object’s favour which is indicated by prefix me- and suffix –
And in the following sentences, the manner of the actions is implicitly presented that cause them to have different meaning.
Andi memukulkan palu ke pencuri itu (Andi uses the hammer to hit the thief)
Andi memukuli pencuri itu (Andi hits the thief –without knowledge of the tools being used).
The words memukulkan and memukuli both mean hit. However, the manners of the action are different. The prefix me- and suffix –kan in memukulkan gives additional meaning that the person doesn’t hit directly but uses certain tools to hit somebody, while in the word memukuli the doer just simply hits somebody using his fist. This case may be different in English, i.e. English are forced to use circumlocution. In addition, English has verbs form variation to give certain time orientation, e.i. past, present, future; while Indonesian need to use circumlocution by using adverbs of time such as besok (tomorrow), kemarin (yesterday), etc.
Those who find Whorfian hypothesis attractive argue that the language a person speaks affects that person’s relationship to the external worlds in one or more ways. If language A has a word for a particular concept, then that word makes it easier for speakers of language A to refer to that concept than speakers of language B who lack such a word and are forced to use a circumlocution. For example, a Balinese word ‘tipat’. Balinese people will instantly recognize what kind of thing tipat is, how to make and so on; however, English native speaker may need a circumlocution to define the word ‘tipat’, - a kind of food made by steaming rice wrapped in coconut leaves- since they lack that word. Other examples also support such claims. The Garo of Assam,
In addition to such claim, it is also stated that if a language requires certain distinctions to be made because of its grammatical system, then the speakers of that language become conscious of the kinds of distinctions that must be referred to. For instance, both German and French have two pronouns corresponding to you, a singular and plural. The equivalent of English stone has a gender in French and German, and the various words must be either plural or singular in German, French and English. In Chinese, however, number is expressed only if it is somehow relevant.
Despite many evidences that support Whorfian hypothesis, there are also evidence s and arguments against it. Boas (1911) long ago pointed out that there was no necessary connection between language and culture or between language and race. People with very different cultures speak languages with many of the same structural characteristics, e.g., Hungarians, Finns, and the Samoyeds of Northern Siberia; and people who speak languages with a very different structure often share much the same cultures, e.g. German and Hungarian, or many people in
Furthermore, there are a lot of researches about the three versions of the Whorfian hypothesis:
- The strong hypothesis—language determines thinking.
- The weak hypothesis—language influences perception.
- The weakest hypothesis—language only influences memory.
The majority of the evidence supports the weakest version of the Whorfian hypothesis, but when participants are given flexibility in their approach, there is also some evidence to support the strong version of the hypothesis and cognitive approach. However, further research is needed to help us to understand how language influences cognition. “Cognition is neither copying nor constructing the world. Cognition is, instead, the process that keeps us active, changing creatures in touch with an eventful, changing world (Reed, 1996).
Today most scientists believe that the strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis, as well as the opposite, the claim that language has no influence on thought, is wrong. Even stronger, the theory is thought to be non-scientific, because of circular reasoning, as Steven Pinker (1994) points out in his book The Language Instinct: “Eskimos speak differently so they must think differently. How do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the way they speak!”.
Finally, the claims that it would be impossible to describe certain things in a particular language because that language lacks the necessary resources are only partially valid at best. The most valid conclusion concerning the Whorfian hypothesis is that it is still unproved. It appears to be quite possible to talk about anything in any language provided a speaker is willing to use some degree of circumlocution. However, some concept may be more ‘codable,’ that is, easier to express, in some languages than in others. Every natural language not only provides its speaker with a language for talking about every other language, that is, a metalanguage, but also provides them with an entirely adequate system for making any kinds of observation that they need to make about the world. If such is the case, every natural language must be an extremely rich system, one that allows its users to overcome any predispositions that exist and to do this without much difficulty.
KINSHIP SYSTEM
One interesting way in which people use language in daily living is to refer to various kinds of kin. Kinship systems are a universal feature of languages, because kinship is so important in social organization. Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. In anthropology the kinship system includes people related both by descent and marriage, while usage in biology includes descent and mating. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called "affinity" in contrast to "descent" (also called "consanguinity"), although the two may overlap in marriages among those of common descent.
Kinship is one of the most basic principles for organizing individuals into social groups, roles, categories, and genealogy. Family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly after degrees of relationship. Some systems are much richer than others, but all make use of such factors as sex, age, generation, blood marriage in their organization. One of the attractions that kinship system has for investigators is that these factors are fairly readily ascertainable. You can therefore relate them with considerable confidence to the actual words that people use to describe a particular kin relationship.
There may be certain difficulties. People may ask about what kind of relationship somebody has to a certain person. For example, that person’s father (Fa), or mother’s brother (MoBr), or mother’s sister’s husband (Mo SiHu), in an attempt to show how individuals employ various terms but without trying to specify anything concerning the semantic composition. Like in English kinship systems, not all kin is referred by one particular single term, some of them are similarly referred by one term, some of them need to be described by using circumlocution. For example both of father’s father (Fa Fa) and mother’s father (Mo Fa) are called grandfather. In addition, English uncle is used to designate father’s brother (Fabr), mother’s brother (Mo Br), father’s sister’s husband (FaSiHu), and mother’s sister’s husband (MoSiHu). You will find too, in English that sister’s husband’s parents (brother in law’s parents) can’t be referred directly; brother in law’s parents is a circumlocution rather than the kind of term that is of interest in kinship terminology.
Please look at the following diagram:
English kinship system
There are also terms which are obviously kinship terms but are used with people who are very obviously not kin by any of the criteria usually employed, e.g. the Vietnamese use of terms equivalent to English sister, brother, uncle, aunt in various social relationship. In addition to this English uncle is also used to designate male close friends of their parents.
There is also an approach that uses different term to describe similar relationship. Burling (1970) in Wardhaugh (1998) describes the kinship system of the Njamal, a tribe of Australian aborigines in this way. To understand why the Njamal use the terms they do, we must know that every Njamal belongs to one of two ‘moieties’ that of his (or her) father; the mother belongs to the other moiety. Marriage must be with someone from the other moiety so that husband and wives and fathers and mothers represent different moiety membership.
One consequence is that a young Njamal man calls by the same name, njuba, his mother’s brother’s daughter (MoBrDa) and his father’s sister’s daughter (FaSiDa), which are both English cousin. But he uses turda for his father’s brother’s daughter (FaBrDa) and his mother’s sister’s daughter ( MoSiDa) when both are older than he is. He calls any such daughter who are younger than he is maraga. All of these are cousins in English. He may marry a njuba, since a cross-cousin is of the opposite moiety, but he cannot marry a turda or a maraga, a parallel cousin of the same moiety. Moeity membership is the overriding consideration in the classification system, being stronger than sex. For example a term like maili is sexually marked as ‘male,’ e.g. FaFa, FaMoHo, FaMoBrWiBr to refer to someone in ascending generation in the same moiety. In a descending generation, however, maili is also used to designate membership in the same moiety, but in this case it can be applied to both males and females to DaDaHu, BrSoDa, and DaSoWiSi. Please study the following Njamal kinship system to have a better understanding about how it works.
Njamal Kinship system
Aunt’s husband (moety A)
It is important to remember that when a term like father, brother, or older brother is used in a kinship system that it carries with it ideas about how such people ought to behave towards others in the society that uses that system. Father, brothers, and older brothers are assumed to have certain rights and duties. In practice, of course, they may behave otherwise. It is kinship system which determines who is called what; it is not the behavior of individuals which leads them to be called this or that.
As social condition change, we can expect kinship to change to reflect new condition. It is now no longer necessary to refer constantly to such relatives or to be so precise as to a particular relationship. Changing family structures have removed them from daily contact. The new longer phrasal terms also indicate the current lack of importance given to certain kinship relationship, in keeping with a general linguistic principle that truly important objects and relationship tend to be expressed through single words rather than through phrases.
COLOR TERMINOLOGY
In some societies and by some anthropologists, color terminology was used to label races, sometimes in addition to a non-color term for the same race. Rather than a literal description of skin color, color is used as a synonym for race. Carolus Linnaeus was the first who recognized four main races: Europeanus which he labeled the white race, Asiatic, which he labeled the yellow race, Americanus, which he labeled the red race, and Africanus, which he labeled the black race
Color terminology has also been used to explore the relationship between different languages and cultures. We find that we sometimes cannot directly translate colors words from one language to another without introducing subtle changes in meaning, E.g. English brown and French brun.
All languages make use of basic color terms which must be a single word, e.g. blue or yellow not a combination of words, e.g. light blue. Nor must it be the obvious sub-division of some higher order term as both crimson and scarlet are of red. The basic colors must have quite general use; i.e. it must not applied only to a very narrow range of objects, as, for example, blond is applied in English almost exclusively to the color of hair and wood. Also basic colors must not be used by only a specific sub-set of speakers, such as interior decorators or fashion writers.
According to
There is an attempt to relate the color terminology in a specific language with the level of cultural and technical complexity in which the language is spoken. There is some reason to believe that communities that show little technological development employ the fewest color terms.
Two points about color terminology seem particularly interesting. One is the existence of such an order in the development of terms as that indicative above, like the fusion of two or more colors. And the second point is that, if any language speakers are asked to identify the parts of the spectrum, they find one system of such identification much easier to manipulate than another. Cross cultural comparisons of such things as color terms were used by Sapir and Whorf as evidence of hypothesis that states language predetermines what we see in the world around us. When we perceive color with our eyes, we are sensing that portion of electromagnetic radiation that is visible light. In other words, there are no distinct colors like red and green in nature. Our culture, through language, guides us in seeing the spectrum in terms of the arbitrarily established categories that we call colors. Different cultures may divide up the spectrum in different ways.
Sapir and Whorf interpreted the colors we see are predetermined by what our culture prepares us to see. All normal humans share similar sense perceptions of color despite differences in color terminology from one language to another. The physiology of our eyes is essentially the same. People all over the world can see subtle gradations of color and can comprehend other ways of dividing up the spectrum of visible light. However, as a society's economy and technology increase in complexity, the number of color terms usually also increases. That is to say, the spectrum of visible light gets subdivided into more categories. As the environment changes, culture and language typically respond by creating new terminology to describe it.
FOLK TAXONOMIES
Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
· Paying attention to the historical evolution of languages results in a genetic classification of languages—which is based on genetic relatedness of languages
· Paying attention to the internal structure of languages (grammar) results in a typological classification of languages—which is based on similarity of one or more components of the language’s grammar across languages
· Respecting geographical closeness and contacts between language-speaking communities result in area groupings of languages.
The previous discussion of kinship terminology shows how basic are certain system of classification in language and society. People also use language to classify and categorize various aspects of the world in which they live, but they don’t always classify things the way scientist do; they often develop system which we call folk taxonomies rather than scientific classification. A folk taxonomy is a way of classifying a certain part of reality so that it makes some kind of senses to those who have to deal with it.
One of the best known studies of a folk taxonomy is Fake’s account (1961) in Wardhaugh (1998) of the terms that Subanun of Minandao in the southern Philiphines uses to describe disease. There is a considerable amount of disease among the Subanum and they discuss it at length particularly disease of skins. Effective treatment depends on proper diagnosis, which itself depends on recognizing the symptoms for what they are.
The Subanum have a variety of categories of skin disease when they discuss a particular set of symptoms. These categories allow them to discuss those symptoms at various levels of generality. For example, ‘nuka’ can refer to skin disease in general but it can also mean ‘eruption’. A nuka may be further distinguished as beldut ‘sore’ rather than a menjabag ‘inflammation’ or buni ‘ringworm’ and the particular beldut can be further distinguished as a telemaw ‘distal ulcer’ or even a telemaw glai ‘shallow distal ulcer’. What we have is a hierarchy of terms with a term nuka at the top and telemaw glai at the bottom.
A folk taxonomy of disease is something that develops with little or no conscious attention. That it can be shown to have a complex hierarchical structure is therefore a rather surprising finding. Evidently, language and culture are related very closely and much of the relationship remains hidden from view to most of us.
PROTOTYPE THEORY
Roch (1976) has proposed an alternative view that concepts are composed from sets of features which necessarily and sufficiently define instances of a concept. Rosch proposes that concepts are best viewed as prototype. Prototype theory offers a principled approach to the exemplification of form - meaning relationships within language. The more an item is judged to be prototypical of a category, the more attributes it has in common with members of contrasting categories". A bird is not best defined by reference to a set of features that refer to such matters as wings, warm-bloodedness, egg-lying characteristics, but rather by reference to typical instances, so that ‘prototypical bird is something more like a robin than a penguin. For furniture, it is a chair that is a typical item of furniture, an ashtray is not. For clothing, trousers are typical items, things like bracelet and purses are not.
According to
TABOO AND EUPHEMISM
This paper is about meaning, specifically about how cultural meanings are expressed in language. But language is used to avoid saying certain things as well as to express them. Certain things are not said, not because they cannot be, but because people don’t talk about those things; or if they talk about those things they will talk about it in a very roundabout ways. In the first case we have instances of linguistics taboo; in the second we have the employment of euphemism so as to avoid mentioning certain matters directly.
Taboo is the prohibition or avoidance against words, objects, actions, or discussions that are considered undesirable or offensive by a group, culture, society, or community behavior and believed to be harmful to its members in that it would cause them anxiety, embarrassment, or shame. Taboo subjects can e vary widely: dietary restriction; sex; death; excretion; bodily function; religious matters; and politics. English has its taboo, and most people who speak English know what are these are and observe the rules. When someone breaks the rules, that rupture may arouse considerable comment, although not perhaps quite as much today as formerly. Standards and norms change. Linguistics taboos are also violated on occasion to draw attention to oneself, or to show contempt, or to be aggressive and provocative, to mock authority or as a form of verbal seduction, e.g. ‘talking dirty’
Language taboos seem to arise from bilingual situation. For example Creeks of Oklahoma whose avoidance of the creek word fakki ‘soil’ as they used more and more English. A similar avoidance can be noticed among Thai students who learn English in English speaking countries. They avoid the word phrig ‘chilli’ in the presence of Anglophones because of the phonetic resemblance of these words to certain taboo English words. Thai speakers also often find it difficult to say the English words yet and key because they sound very much like the Thai words jed, a vulgar word for ‘ to have intercourse’
As mentioned above, taboo words can be mentioned by using circumlocution or euphemism- the dressing up in language of certain areas in life to make them more presentable. Euphemistic words and expression allow us to talk about unpleasant things and disguise or neutralize the unpleasantness. Taboo and euphemism affect us all. We all probably have a few things we refuse to talk about and still others we do not talk directly. We may have some words we know but never – or hardly ever – use because they are too emotional for either us or others. Having control of taboo language means power. If you know when, how, where and why to use it - or not use it - you have more power over your interactions with others than if you don't.
CLOSURE
Language has close relationship with culture. They cannot be separated because the dynamic interaction of human to other human, the users of language, is always related to the culture they have. The language the humans utter including the structure, intonation, diction and others, gives information indirectly about their culture and how the behave and think about everything happen in this world. The way they behave to the other family members, the language they use as folk taxonomy, the prototype theory that help them to use language, and the way they say and do not say something that is believed as taboo are the reflection of language and culture close relationship.
REFERENCE
......... Taboo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo
.........Language and Thought Processes. http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language
.........Color Terminology for Race. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_terminology_for_race
.......Kinship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship
.......Language Taxonomy. http://freelanguage.org/general-language-info/language-taxonomy
.........Language and Thought. http://www.psypress.com
........The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/introductory/sapirw.htm
Duranti. Prototype Theory, Cognitive Linguistics And Pedagogical Grammar http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/45/4500060.pdf.
Kay. 1999. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/color.ps.
Metzmacher .Martin. 2007. The Whorfian Hypothesis: Language and Thought. Where are all the Eskimos gone? http://behaviouralscience.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/the-whorfian-hypothesis-language-and-thought
Wardhaugh, Ronald. 1998. An Introduction to Sociolinguistic. USA: Blackwell Publisher. Inc
