In my years of teaching language and literature, I have always believed that culture and language are intricately woven societal elements that help a community claim a unique identity against other societies and pass such identity from one generation to another. The journal article (Freimuth, 2006) on Language and Culture helped me justify my assumptions on the close relationship between language and culture through various arguments presented in the article. Believing in one linguistic characteristic such as the cultural aspect of every language is different from gaining the firm resolve that they indeed complement each other. Gaining a balanced and wider perspective on the relationship between language and culture enables me to reflect not only on the characteristics of language but also on its role in building societies and preserving the identity that every community nurtures.
Hilda Freimuth began her article with the definition of culture. And just like any concept paper, the concepts should be well-defined before discussions are carried out. She included the different definitions of culture, and they served as points of arguments in my first attempt at understanding language and culture. Here are some of the definitions she mentioned:
According to Whorf (1956), language determines, influences, and limits a person’s perspective of the world. Though controversy surrounded this idea about language, the connection that it establishes with culture should also be considered. Our understanding of the world could be affected by the capacity of our language to describe what we perceive. Whorf’s concept complements the idea of the limitations of language. In Chomsky’s concept of linguistic competence, the rules of the language are just descriptions of the observed recurrences within the system of lexicon and grammar. Thus, language is a limited description of what exists in the perspective of an individual and his society. If language itself is limited, a society’s perspective of the world can only extend as much as how its language can describe -- as much as the society can comprehend. This works both ways. Language develops as a society encounters new human experiences that demand new linguistic representations. A society’s growing perspective of the world extends the capacity of its language to describe what exists within a society’s understanding. Thus, language grows with the society, making it dynamic. This is also the reason language ceases to grow when it is no longer used by a group of people. There would be no human understanding to sustain, and so the language dies.
An example of how language grows with the society is the Filipino understanding of the word ‘tokhang,’ which was hailed as Salita ng Taon in Sawikaan 2018 by the Filipinas Institute of Translation, University of the Philippines Diliman, and Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF). According to the body, the winner was chosen based on the meaning of the word in the life of Filipinos, its reflection of the current state of the society, the depth of research accompanying the proposal, and its presentation to the public. The word was submitted by Mark Angeles, Filipino poet, fiction writer, and essayist. The word ‘tokhang’ came from the Cebuano word ‘toktok-hangyo’ which means knock and plead. It is a polite request that turned into a word that describes the violent drug war that killed thousands of Filipinos under the Duterte administration. Lifeless bodies along the streets were no longer called as mere corpses but ‘na-tokhang’ which presumes that these deaths are results of the drug war. The prevalence of extra-judicial killings made the Filipino language adopt ‘tokhang’ in its entirely new meaning to describe a unique and unprecedented human experience like deaths in a drug war. The seeming normalcy of the culture of killing made the language adopt a new linguistic representation. This leads us to culture as an influential element on the development and acquisition of language and vice versa.
Culture is a parcel of the societal understanding that language enriches and, at the same time, describes. Since culture is socially acquired, according to Wardhaugh (2002), one’s language can reflect the culture that a society upholds. According to Bates and Plog (1990), culture includes the “shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts of the members of a society, that are used to cope with their world, with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.” We already know what constitutes culture, but the keywords that we need to note in this definition are (1) the function of culture to help members of the society cope with their world and with one another, and (2) the preservation of this culture across generations.
Coping with one’s world and with the other members of the society refers to the function of culture to set the standards of behavior that is acceptable to the society. According to Goodenough (1957) culture is what one needs to know or believe to exhibit acceptable behavior. These perceived and accepted standards of social behavior must be coursed through the members who will observe them. The role of language in the promulgation of this acceptable social behavior demands the capacity of the language to describe cultural specifications. This makes any language tightly-knitted with culture as its core. This intricate relationship between language and culture is supported by Sapir (1929) since a language can only describe what a society knows, believes, and accepts. This relationship between language as means to propagate culture and culture as a social behavior could have prompted the initial behaviorist theories on language before it became known as a biologically-based characteristic of the human mind. Since culture is a learned behavior and language describes this behavior, language acquisition is possible through exhibiting the same behaviors that the language describes. However, we already know that language acquisition is not as limited as behavioral language theories proposed. The human mind makes language acquisition possible in more ways other than learned behavior. Language acquisition leads us to the next role of language in the society as means to preserve culture.
Language is not solely used to extend accepted social behavior within a community but also to preserve such culture across generations. Thus, society equips the language with the lexicon necessary to describe the culture that they need to pass onto the next generation. An example of this is the rich Japanese language that has words to describe several Japanese cultures that do not have the exact translation in other nations because of their unique set of values, beliefs, and social behavior. Some of these words are ‘Origami,’ the Japanese art of paper folding; ‘Chanoyu,’ the Japanese tea ceremony; ‘Ikebana,’ the Japanese art of flower arrangement, and ‘Seppuku’ or ‘Harakiri,’ the Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment to restore one’s and family’s honor. The Japanese language does not sit idly in describing traditions, but continuously grow to describe emerging concepts that the current Japanese society faces. Some of these are the Japanese pop culture fashion of dark and cute, ‘Yamikawaii,’ and the alarming culture of death by overwork, ‘Karoshi.’ All these words can be translated into another language but one cannot fully grasp the meaning of these words without understanding the Japanese culture embedded in each linguistic representation. The Japanese is just one of the many societies that preserves their culture, and their language is one of their means. The language acts as markers of cultural elements that one society can pass on. It transforms the abstraction of a nation’s identity into a concrete and observable behavior that people can learn. Therefore, language works together with socially accepted behaviors for the preservation of culture.
The inseparability of language and culture, which Wenying Jiang (2000) discussed in a study on native speakers, makes language acquisition not only a linguistic pursuit but also a cultural affair. The connection of the two made second language learning anchor on the cultural and linguistic aspects instead on the mere instruction of language structure. According to Hammerly (1985) second language learners can only be considered fully trained when they exhibit both knowledge and behavior of the culture of the language they are learning. That way, language learners can effectively use context and implications based on their deeper understanding of the language and the culture it represents. Thus, the relationship of language and culture is not limited to the functions of promulgation and preservation of culture. Language concretizes the existence of a behavior, an identity, a tradition, a way of life.
Reference:
Freimuth, H. (2006). Language and Culture. UGRU Journal.
