Culture and Communication

In its broadest sense, culture may be understood as a comprehensive view of history. It encompasses politics, economics, social history, philosophy, science and technology, education, the arts, religion and customs, which can be studied either as they have developed over a long period of time, or as they are or were at a given point in time. Culture includes the spiritual aspect of a society, embracing its ideological, artistic and religious trends. It may also be understood as a picture of everyday life, including everyday activities and entertainment, clothing, fashions, living conditions, family and social relations, customs, beliefs, morality, acceptable patterns of behavior and rituals. Finally, social consciousness, which is expressed in the language of events and processes, institutions and organizations, social values and artistic creativity are also a part of culture expressed in the language. It is 'seemingly permanent, yet constantly changing' reality, which is ever present to all individuals belonging to the same cultural group [Smitherman 1991: 5].

Culture helps us to know how far we can go as individuals and what our responsibility is to the group. Different cultures are the underlying structures which make Round community round and Square community square [Labov 1994].

The political, social and economic history of a given cultural group, as well as its spiritual heritage, form an important source of background information that allows members of the language community to respond correctly to allegories, figures of speech, symbols and behavioral patterns which relate to its history. For example, if one knows the old story of King Arthur, one will comprehend better the idea of a 'Round Table'. While problems like those, which to the more distant and well described events in the life of a community or nation can be solved by studying its history, the learner will find it much harder to comprehend fully the enormously complicated reality of everyday life and social consciousness of that language community. Not only do we have to deal with a multitude of culture specific patterns in communication, but also with the more recent social, cultural, political, economic and spiritual history of the group, especially that covering the life span of the people we communicate with. Having participated personally in an number of events, having had access to everyday local and national news, as well as personal communication with other people, adult members of a language community share a store of information built over a period of many years, and they use it actively in everyday communication.

The most obvious areas of culture-specific communication would be jokes, especially political, but also sayings, metaphors, indeed most references to the not so distant past in the life of the language community. For instance, only a few years ago the then Australian treasurer, Mr. Paul Keating, while defending his economic policies in parliament, described the recession the country was in as 'a recession we had to have'. At the time it caused not only outrage, but also a lot of jokes. It was a minor news item in other English-speaking countries, and it will have been forgotten by now, while in Australia it has become part of everyday language and will probably survive for quite some time: a variety of versions of this statement (such as 'the disappointment we had to have' or 'the power failure we had to have') have been used by Australians to add a touch of humour when there is a story behind it, neither people from non-English-speaking countries, nor most Australians, Britons or Canadians coming to Australia would probably be able to understand why most Australians laugh when they hear it, even if the phrase is used seriously.

There are a multitude of references like this present in everyday communication between members of any language community — some of them easier to follow, others completely inaccessible to non-members. Everyday life and social consciousness are shaped both by older traditions and current events, which influence directly and constantly the ever changing vocabulary and idiom of the language, acceptable and unacceptable ways of linguistic behaviour in various situations, as well as the choice of those elements of the past which are considered relevant to the life of the language community and those which are not.

In terms of language communication we are dealing here with second level or specific meanings (i.e. additional meanings based on current and/ or past cultural associations, specific contexts or situations) in contrast to first level meanings (i.e. conventional dictionary meanings of words), |Sussex, Zubrycki 1985]. First level meanings may in fact be quite similar in two different languages, while second level meanings may differ significantly. For instance, the colour 'white' means more or less the same at the first level in most languages, yet it may have quite different second level meaning in different cultures. For example, in some Western European countries, white is the colour of purity or joy or life, while in many Asian cultures it is the is the colour of mourning and death. The numbers 4 and 13 have the same first level meanings English and Chinese, yet 4 is an unlucky number for Chinese, while 13 is for the English.

As Young observes, no meanings expressed in language are fixed, or constant. They are:

'always moving and changing, but not necessarily in an arbitrary or senseless way. Meanings and rules ofthumb for effective communication grow up in a culture and skip against each other like geological faults. The flow of first level meanings... has a rate of change different from the flow of second level or specific meanings... First order meanings are in movement, but their movement is much slower that the rate of change of second language meanings' lYoungl996:42].

People do not usually realize how much their daily life is influenced by unwritten rules automatically accepted and applied within their social class, their neighbourhood, their country. They not only tend to take them for granted, but also frequently make the wrong assumption that everyone operates within the same system of cultural rules. It is not until they come into contact with another culture, through the media or by travelling and especially by moving permanently from one region to another, from town to countryside or from one country to another, that they realize they have problems with interpreting other people's actions and reactions. They find out that the assumptions which have guided their behaviour at home are no longer valid, in short, that the social environment encountered in this way follows a different set of rules, some of which may be quite difficult to comprehend. Such encounters with situations and behaviours which seem t be out of the ordinary, will inevitably lead to comparisons and value judgments, orcultural stereotypes of members of other speech communities, many of which may even be quite wrong. In the case of people who need to spend a longer period of time in a different cultural environment than their own, this may also be the cause of considerable stress, known as the phenomenon of'culture shock'.

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