Language and Culture

Language, from my perspective, was created unconsciously by ancient people. Probably one day a group of people were doing work, and one of them somehow produced a sound while he was doing a specific work. The sound was accepted by other people working together, who thought this sound represents this specific work. And they began to simulate this sound when they want to do the work. This sound became a sign, meaning this work or doing this work. Gradually, there were more sound showing up, representing different meanings. People found it is more convenient to use sound to communicate because then you don’t have to show people what you want to do. With the increase of sounds, people communicates more frequently and fluently. These sounds representing different things were considered the prototype of language.

Culture, from my perspective, is the social behavior in human societies. It is also a set of tradtions, custom and values in societies. Culture is determined by environment conditions and has numerous expressive forms, such as arts, music, rituals and food. For example, people from Finland are likely to eat seafood whereas people living in the innerland are likely to eat porks, beef. An d people from different countries have different style of expressive forms, such as architecture in Britain and in America. Besides, culture can also mean the specific practice among a group, typically rituals. But sometime the practice may not be accepted by the outsiders, who are not within the groups. Then an anthropological term called cultural relativism come up. Cultural relativism means we cannot judge a culture by our own opinion instead we should combine history context, environment together to have a overall view of a culture. In a word, culture have different forms and various expressive avenues. It’s the social behavior among all human societies.

As far as I am concerned, language and culture are mutually affected. It is true that language and culture intertwines. For example, in kingdom of Bhutan, people admire dicks and every family will paint dicks on their doors. In doing so, they think, can help them drives the devil away and gain safety. In their language, a lot of words and sentences also deal with dicks. Moreover, language plays an important role in culture. We can trace the history through language and language also is recording our times. Archaeologist learnt the history of ancient country by learning their language and communicating with decedants. A specific word can also represent a culture, like the N-word in America history. When you say that word, it will be consider as racial discrimination. And popular words on the Internet also stands for a phenomenon happening in the society. Moreover, the spread of culture needs language as a vehicle. In the ancient, the missionary traveled around the word, disseminating their own culture through convincing people.

In a word, language originated from culture and inherited culture. Neither of them can be sperated. Language wouldn’t form without being affected by culture. Culture wouldn't survive without being succeeded to next generation throughlanguage