Language and Communication

The Relationship of Language and Culture

BASIC LANGUAGE AND CULTURE CONCEPTS

Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When is used in contexts of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways.

To begin with, the words people utter refer to common experience. They express facts, ideas or events that are communicable because they refer to a stock of knowledge about the world that other people share. Words also reflect their authors' attitudes and beliefs, their point of view that are also those of others. In both cases, language expresses culture reality.

But members of a community or social group do not only express experience; they also create experience through language. They give meaning to it through the medium they choose to communicate with one another, for example, speaking on the telephone or face-to-face, writing a letter or sending an e-mail message, reading the newspaper or interpreting a graph or a chart. The way in which people use the spoken, written, or visual medium itself creates meanings that are understandable to the group they belong to, for example, through a speaker's tone of voice, accent, conversational style, gestures and facial expression. Through all its verbal and non-verbal aspects, language embodies culture reality.

Finally, language is a system of signs that is seen as having itself a culture value. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language; they view their language as a symbol of their social identity. The prohibition of its use is often perceived by its speakers as a rejection of their social group and their culture. Thus, we can say that language symbolizes culture reality.

Communication is one of the most important aspects of our everyday activity. In fact, most things we do are directly or indirectly connected with communication: we acquire (learn) or provide (teach) information, ideas, views, stories, give or follow instructions, requests, or commands, express feelings, emotions, etc. There are a number of ways in which we can communicate, but natural languages, such as Chinese, English, French, Russian, Zulu, are certainly the most frequently used and most efficient carriers of messages between people.

A natural language is sometimes described as a communication tool consisting, in most simple rules, of a vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation and spelling rules, i.e. a list of words and a system of rules governing their use in speech and writing. If every item in the vocabulary had only one, unchangeable meaning, and if the grammar consisted of a finite number of fixed rules for every conceivable utterance, one might say that, in order to communicate effectively, the participant in a communicative act must both be competent in the use if the same vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and spelling rules. This is indeed the case with artificial languages (e.g. computer languages), but not with natural languages, where both the vocabularies and the grammars offer practically unlimited possibilities for producing new, original message. As Corder rightly puts it out:

'No one knows 'the whole ' of any language, or how to use it appropriately in all possible situations of language use. He acquires those parrs of it which he needs in order to play his part in society. As he grows older, the roles that are ascribed to him or that he acquires change and develop, and as they change he learns more of his language (he may also forget some)' [Corder 1973:34].

If even the majority of native speakers of a language are incapable of using fully the existing vast potential, what about learners of English as a foreign language in their native country? Are they automatically, as it were, in an inferior position at the outset, due to limited exposure (mainly in the language classroom and through books and short visits to English-speaking countries)? Not necessarily so: it must be said to the credit of English teachers around the world and the resolve of their students that have an additional problem to overcome though, resulting from the fact that language is more than just a code, or a symbolic system. As Anna Wierzbicka rightly points out, 'Languages differfrom one another not just as linguistic systems but also as cultural universes, as vehicles of ethnic identities' [Wierzbicka 1985: 202]. Every language functions in a community within the framework of its culture and, consequently, successful communication depends to a large extent on such things as what the content of the utterance actually refers to, which of the grammatically correct words, phrases or sentence patterns suit a given situation, and which do not, when to say things and how or, for that matter, whether to say anything at all. It follows that, to communicate effectively, the learner must be able to combine linguistic competence with the ability to operate within the accepted set of cultural rules of communication of a social group using it [Brick 1991: 121.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11