Language and Culture

Language is a very complicated idea. At very first language is not related with the words or letters written down, but only the sounds with information. Language was made during the evolution of human for reciprocity, a better arrangment of food, during the process which hominins walked out of African forest and came to African savanna, while now it slowly developed into the main way for commuication. Until now you can find some dialects and small languages which don’t have any writting record, but it was still used in very small population. Above all, as a matter of fact, this idea can support one truth that, whether someone is illterate, language still has influence on him.

I would like to argue that language is the prerequisite of culture. It’s extremely hard, or impossible to discusse culture of the certain country without mentioning its language, no matter it is literature, philosophy, even moral values of public. Because culture is constucted by communication within society, language—the most important method—used for communication, is indispensably related to culture. Language helps to form the most content in the culture.

We have lots of example for this ideas.

At first, language allows continuty in time. people today can hear the story of Greek Mythology, Athena and Zeus, from Homer’s Hymns, and it was transferred between numerous generations by language. If language was lost, those stories would be like Cuneiform, which was hard to understand.

Meanwhile, language also create variability within human society. Different culture, like western ideas and eastern ideas were usually divided by different languages. Limited understanding for foreign languages gives local culture enough time to develop unique style or even nationality of a country. In Europe, we have Christianity, Orthodox and Jewism, but in Asia, Buddism, Daoism and Islam are all pretty popular religions. Various languages can make the world more colorful.

At last, the investigation on language also expand the boundary of culture. As times go on, writing is not the only kind of culture related with language. I always mentioned rap music in my past essays, and those Trap, Old School and New School are all combinations of language and music. Comics, animation, can be identified as combination of picture art and language. The creativity of music excites human to move on for a more colorful and interesting culture background.

Be aware of the importance of culture, we should have respect on how own language, because language created culture, and made us HUMAN, Americans, Chinese, British or Japanese in modern society.