ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture.
2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
What is Culture?
The word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good
literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other
microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish. However, for
anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human
behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist
Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that 1
culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and
any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not
limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central
focus of anthropology. Edward B. Tylor
Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and (1832-
1917) easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other
man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason,
archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient
people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and
used through cultural knowledge and skills.
Layers of Culture
There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions.
Most obviously is the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When people speak of
Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each
of these peoples apart from others. In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as
they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.
The second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is a subculture. In
complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts
of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions. As a
result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society.
The shared cultural 3 traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their
society. Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States include
ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of
these subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come
from their common ancestral background and experience. As the cultural differences between members of a
subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except
as a group of people who claim a common ancestry. That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish
Americans in the United States today. Most of them identify themselves as Americans first. They also see
themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.
Cuban American women in Miami, Florida have a shared subculture
identity that is reinforced through their language, food, and other traditions
The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals. These are learned
behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter
where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of
such "human cultural" traits include:
ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture. 2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
1. communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical
rules for constructing sentences
2. using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3. classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer
to them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4. raising children in some sort of family setting
5. having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6. having a concept of privacy 2
7. having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8. distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9. having some sort of body ornamentation
10. making jokes and playing games
11. having art
12. having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions
While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own
specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands
to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules
just as verbal ones do.
Culture and Society
Culture and society are not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and
perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies.
Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups
of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that
their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.
While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created
and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously
evolving products
of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms
of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.
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Characteristics of Culture
In order to better understand culture, it is useful to closely examine its characteristics and their ramifications.
Culture Is an Adaptive Mechanism
The first humans evolved in tropical and subtropical regions of Africa about 2.5 million years ago. Since then, we
have successfully occupied all of the major geographic regions of the world, but our bodies have remained
essentially those of warm climate animals. We cannot survive outside of the warmer regions of our planet without
our cultural knowledge and technology. What made it possible for our ancestors to begin living in temperate and
ultimately subarctic regions of the northern hemisphere after half a million years ago was the invention of efficient
hunting skills, fire use, and, ultimately, clothing, warm housing, agriculture, and commerce. Culture has been a
highly successful adaptive mechanism for our species. It has given us a major selective advantage in the competition
ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture. 2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
for survival with other life forms. Culture has allowed the global human population to grow from less than 10
million people shortly after the end of the last ice age to more than 6.5 billion people today, a mere 10,000 years
later. Culture has made us the most dangerous and the most destructive large animal on our planet. It is ironic that
despite the power that culture has given us, we are totally dependent on it for survival. We need our cultural skills
to stay alive.
Over the last several hundred thousand years, we have developed new survival related cultural skills and
technologies at a faster rate than natural selection could alter our bodies to adapt to the environmental challenges
that confronted us. The fact that cultural evolution can occur faster than biological evolution has significantly
modified the effect of natural selection on humans. One consequence of this has been that we have not developed 3
thick fat layers and dense fur coats like polar bears in the cold regions because our culture provided the necessary
warmth during winter times.
Culture is learned
Human infants come into the world with basic drives such as hunger and thirst, but they do not possess instinctive
patterns of behavior to satisfy them. Likewise, they are without any cultural knowledge. However, they are
genetically predisposed to rapidly learn language and other cultural traits. New born humans are amazing learning
machines. Any normal baby can be placed into any family on earth and grow up to learn their culture and accept it
as his or her own. Since culture is noninstinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one.
Every human generation potentially can discover new things and invent better technologies. The
new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations. As a
result, culture is cumulative. Due to this cumulative effect, most high school students today are
now familiar with mathematical insights and solutions that ancient Greeks such as Archimedes
and Pythagoras struggled their lives to discover.
Cultural evolution is due to the cumulative effect of culture. We now understand that the time North American
children between major cultural inventions has become steadily shorter, especially since the invention of informally
learning the agriculture 8,000-10,000 years ago. The progressively larger human population after that time was
culture of their parents very likely both a consequence and a cause of accelerating culture growth. The more people
there are, the more likely new ideas and information will accumulate. If those ideas result in a larger, more secure
food supplies, the population will inevitably grow. In a sense, culture has been the human solution to surviving
changing environments, but it has continuously compounded the problem by making it possible for more humans
to stay alive. In other words, human cultural evolution can be seen as solving a problem that causes the same
problem again and again. The ultimate cost of success of cultural technology has been a need to produce more and
more food for more and more people.
Cultures Change
All cultural knowledge does not perpetually accumulate. At the same time that new cultural
traits are added, some old ones are lost because they are no longer useful. For example,
most city dwellers today do not have or need the skills required for survival in a wilderness.
Most would very likely starve to death because they do not know how to acquire wild foods
and survive the extremes of weather outdoors. What is more important in modern urban
life are such things as the ability to drive a car, use a computer, and understand how to
obtain food in a supermarket or restaurant.
ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture. 2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
The regular addition and subtraction of cultural traits results in culture change. All cultures change over time--none is
static. However, the rate of change and the aspects of culture that Tool of modern technology change varies
from society to society. For instance, people in Germany today generally seem eager 5
to adopt new words from other languages, especially from American English, while many French people are
resistant to it because of the threat of "corrupting" their own language. However, the French are just as eager as the
Germans to adopt new technology.
People Usually are not Aware of Their Culture
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The way that we interact and do things in our everyday lives seems "natural" to us. We are unaware of our culture
because we are so close to it and know it so well. For most people, it is as if their learned behavior was
biologically inherited. It is usually only when they come into contact with people from another culture that they
become aware that their patterns of behavior are not universal.
The common response in all societies to other cultures is to judge them in terms of the values and customs of their own
familiar culture. This is ethnocentrism. Being fond of your own way of life and condescending or even hostile toward
other cultures is normal for all people. Alien culture traits are often viewed as being not just different but inferior, less
sensible, and even "unnatural." For example, European cultures strongly condemn other societies that practice polygamy
and the eating of dogs-behavior that Europeans generally consider to be immoral and offensive. Likewise, many people
in conservative Muslim societies, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, consider European women highly immodest
and immoral for going out in public without being chaperoned by a male relative and without their bodies covered from
head to toe so as to prevent men from looking at them. Ethnocentrism is not characteristic only of complex modern
societies. People in small, relatively isolated societies are also ethnocentric in their views about outsiders.
Our ethnocentrism causes us to be shocked and even disgusted at attitudes about other
animals in different cultures. This North American woman considers her dog to be a close friend
and essentially a member of her own family. In the Muslim world, dogs are generally considered
to be dirty animals that are likely to be kicked if they get in the way. In some areas of Southeast
Asia, dogs have multiple functions, including being a source of food for people.
Our ethnocentrism can prevent us from understanding and appreciating another culture. When
anthropologists study other societies, they need to suspend their own ethnocentric judgments and adopt a cultural
relativity approach. That is, they try to learn about and interpret the various aspects of the culture they are studying
in reference to that culture rather than to the anthropologist's own culture.
Implications for language teaching
Teachers must instruct their students on the cultural background of language usage. If one teaches language without
teaching about the culture in which it operates, the students are learning empty or meaningless symbols or they may
attach the incorrect meaning to what is being taught. The students, when using the learnt language, may use the
language inappropriately or within the wrong cultural context, thus defeating the purpose of learning a language.
ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture. 2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
What is Language?
Many animal and even plant species communicate with each other. Humans are not unique in this capability.
However, human language is unique in being a symbolic communication system that is learned instead of
biologically inherited. Symbols are sounds or things which have meaning given to them by the users. Originally,
the meaning is arbitrarily assigned. For instance, the English word "dog" does not in any way physically resemble
the animal it stands for. All symbols have a material form but the meaning cannot be discovered by mere sensory 5
examination of their forms. They are abstractions.
Do the following words sound or look like the animal shown here: canis ,
chien , hund , perro ? 1
(They all are words for dog in European
languages.)
A word is one or more sounds that in combination have a specific meaning assigned by a language. The symbolic
meaning of words can be so powerful that people are willing to risk their lives for them or take the lives of others.
For instance, words such as "queer" and "nigger" have symbolic meaning that is highly charged emotionally in
America today for many people. They are much more than just a sequence of sounds to us.
A major advantage of human language being a learned symbolic communication system is that it is infinitely
flexible. Meanings can be changed and new symbols created. This is evidenced by the fact that new words are
invented daily and the meaning of old ones change. For example, the English word "nice" now generally means
pleasing, agreeable, polite, and kind. In the15th century it meant foolish, wanton, lascivious, and even wicked.
Languages evolve in response to changing historical and social conditions. Some language transformations
typically occur in a generation or less. For instance, the slang words used by your parents were very likely different
from those that you use today. You also probably are familiar with many technical terms, such as "text messaging"
and "high definition TV", that were not in general use even a decade ago.
Language and speech are not the same thing. Speech is a broad term simply referring to patterned verbal behavior.
In contrast, a language is a set of rules for generating speech. A dialect is a variant of a language. If it is associated
with a geographically isolated speech community, it is referred to as a regional dialect. However,
if it is spoken by a speech community that is merely socially isolated, it is called a social dialect.
These latter dialects are mostly based on class, ethnicity , gender , age, and particular social
situations. Black English (or Ebonics ) in the United States is an example of a social dialect.
Dialects may be both regional and social. An example is the Chinese spoken dialect and written
form called nushu. It apparently was known and used only by women in the village of Jiang-yong
in Hunan Province of South China. Women taught nushu only to their daughters and used it to
write memoirs, create songs, and share their thoughts with each other. While women also knew Women in
and used the conventional Chinese dialect of their region, they used nushu to maintain female Papua New
support networks in their male dominated society. Nushu is essentially gone now due to its Guinea
suppression during the 1950's and 1960's by the communist government of China. The last speaker conversing in
Pidgin English
and writer of nushu was a woman named Yang Huanyi. She died in 2004. Not all societies have
distinct dialects. They are far more common in large-scale diverse societies than in small-scale
homogenous ones. Over the last few centuries, deaf people have developed sign languages that are complex visual-
gestural forms of communicating with each other. Since they are effective communication systems with
standardized rules, they also must be considered languages in their own right even though they are not spoken.
A pidgin is a simplified, makeshift language that develops to fulfill the communication needs of people who
have no language in common but who need to occasionally interact for commercial and other reasons.
Pidgins combine a limited amount of the vocabulary and grammar of the different languages. People who use
ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture. 2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
pidgin languages also speak their own native language. Over the last several centuries, dozens of pidgin
languages developed as Europeans expanded out into the rest of the world for colonization and trade. The most
well-known one is Pidgin English in New Guinea. However, several forms of Pidgin English and Pidgin French
also developed in
West Africa and the Caribbean. There have been pidgins developed by non-European cultures as well, including
the Zulus in South Africa, the Malays in Southeast Asia, the Arabs in North Africa, and several American Indian
societies. The most well-known pidgin developed by American Indians is Chinook, which was used on the
Northwest Coast of North America.
At times, a pidgin language becomes the mother tongue of a population. When that happens, it is called a creole 6
language. As pidgins change into creoles over several generations, their vocabularies enlarge. In the small island
nation of Haiti, a FrenchAfrican pidgin became the creole language. It is still spoken thereby the majority of the
population as their principle or only language. The same thing happened among some of the peoples of Papua New
Guinea, the Pacific Islands of Vanuatu, and
Sierra Leone in West Africa, where different versions of Pidgin English became creoles. Similarly, on the outer
banks of Georgia and South Carolina in the United States, isolated former African slaves made another version of
Pidgin English into a creole known as Gullah or Geechee . Creoles also developed in Louisiana, Jamaica, and the
Netherlands Antilles .
It is common for creole speakers to also speak another "standard" language as well. In Haiti, for instance, the more
educated and affluent people also speak French among themselves. Their creole language is used on the street in
dealing with poor Haitians. The Gullah speakers of Georgia and South Carolina speak English when dealing with
outsiders. Which language is spoken depends on the social situation. This same phenomenon is often found in
societies with different dialects of the same language. People may quickly switch back and forth between dialects,
depending on the person they are talking to at the time. This pattern is referred to as diglossia or "code switching."
The African American situational use of standard and Black English is a prime 2 example. Black English is usually
reserved for talking with other African Americans. North American reporters and announcers on national television
programs are often diglossic. They must learn to speak with a Midwestern, European American dialect regardless of
the region or social class they came from originally. We become so accustomed to this that it is usually a shocking
surprise to hear them speak in their own dialects.
Typically, the dialects of a society are ranked relative to each other in terms of social status. In the London area of
England, the upper class speak "public school" English, while the lower class often use a Cockney dialect. Because of
the stigma against the latter, upwardly mobile Cockneys in the business world may take language lessons to acquire the
"public school" speech patterns.
Learning Language
Language is arguably the most important component of culture because much of the rest of it is normally transmitted
orally. It is impossible to understand the subtle nuances and deep meanings of another culture without knowing its
language well.
Young children are inherently capable of learning the necessary phonemes, morphemes, and syntax as they mature.
In other words, they have a genetic propensity to learn language. They come into the world as eager learning
machines, and language acquisition is a major aspect of this learning. How children actually learn a language is not
entirely clear, however. Most linguists believe that they do it primarily by listening to and trying to communicate
with adult speakers. Initially, this means that they imitate the phonemes. Later they begin to learn grammar by
imitation as well.
ESTUDIOS INTERCULTURALES Language and Culture. 2024
EN LENGUA INGLESA I
ISFD y T N* 85~ Zárate Prof. M. Jimena Velli
Becoming Multilingual
Learning a second or third language is easier in early childhood than later. It is particularly important to learn
correct pronunciation as young as possible. At any age, learning by constant contact with native speakers in their
own society is the quickest and best way. It is superior to taking foreign language classes because it forces you to
concentrate on it all of the time. In addition, you are immersed in the culture and learn it simultaneously. This
immersion approach can be psychologically stressful, but it is an effective way of getting the new language patterns
into long term memory. Young children learn their native language in just this way, since they are surrounded by
parents who essentially speak a "foreign" tongue.
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Resource: Dr. Dennis O'Neil
Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California
