How does language affect culture?

Answer 1

Answer :Language is never the entity which has been invented or scripted in isolation. It certainly has evolved gradually with the continuous development of a culture. A culture being a building made of social behaviors, human emotions, or way of expressing feelings, the language has continually adapted accordingly to accommodate these identified notion and gesture of human activity. Finding a symbolism every time to register it in the language, thus contributing to its growth. A language has always been a weapon to express one's ideas and feelings. And the reason enough to make this weapon more efficient to handle one's need of expressing things with intended accuracy. It has been tuned-up with each new finding, getting honed up continually to get its flawless shape with developing culture.

ANSWER:

Culture is learned. We teach through language.

Language's effect on culture can be extremely subtle. For years, what is evil in the Western world is also "dark," and "black," where the good is characterized by "white." Sometimes in language, we become comfortable with one another by sharing jokes, and though racist jokes may seem like nothing to some people, they can carry the continued influences of stereotyping.

To go further, to be a "sissy" or when someone "pussyfoots" around, it is identified with "weak." For years women have been considered the second sex, a gentler sex, a weaker sex, and this informed our language. Now this language comes back to us when women are steadily reaching to have the same equality in politics, economics, and in general society that men have. Yet we continue to use words that on a subconscious level identify women with "weak."

ANSWER:

Further associations between language and gender are illustrated in the following quote from How does our language shape the way we think?, an article by psychologist Lera Broditsky which details how native speakers of languages that are gender-based can have their opinions formed by this aspect of language.

"Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does."

If one's personal opinion of an object can be shaped by the way in which language has represented it, it doesn't take a massive leap of faith to believe that it affects humans at a macro scale as well. An example given in the article is the visual representations of abstract concepts in art. For example, Death is most often represented as a male in German art but as a female in Russian art; these correlate with their lingual representations, where death is a masculine word in German and a feminine word in Russian.

Answer 2

Language is a key component of culture as it shapes how individuals communicate and express ideas, beliefs, and values. It influences social interactions, perceptions, and relationships within a community or society. Language also reflects cultural norms and traditions, helping to maintain and transmit cultural knowledge from generation to generation.

Answer 3

Cultures vary in how much meaning is embedded in thelanguage itself and how much meaning is interpreted from the context in which the communication occurs. In low-context cultures such as U.S.A, meaning is embedded mainly in the messages transmitted and is presently directed. People in low-context cultures say what they mean and gets right to the point. In high-context cultures such as Asia, meaning is interpreted based on the physical, social and relational context. People in high-context cultures say what they mean in an indirect way for example, "Yes" may mean "I agree with you." or it may mean "I am too embarrass to disagree with you in this environment."