Culture is linked directly to language. Typically, people’s interaction with the world is influenced by the language and vocabulary used during conversations. Also, how people from different cultures categorize and name things in their respective languages reflects their cultural values and experiences. This link can be seen directly through kinship ties, color perception, naming systems, and even time and space concepts.
Kinship ties teach people many things about the relationship shared between language and culture. Holmes (2008, p. 343) reported that kinship words reveal how a language’s speakers view family, its members, and their relationships linked to cultural factors. Cultures with a strong nuclear family structure might separate terms not performed in another culture. Wierzbicka (1997, p. 27) noted that the Australian Language Kayardild does not have a word for brother or sister. However, it requires a speaker to carefully pay attention to the order of birth of each child in a family and their gender. This isn’t very clear when one wants to establish kinship ties within a family. In the case of the royal family, Wierzbicka (1997, p. 27) believes that English speakers will use the same word when referring to Queen Elizabeth’s sister and Prince Charles’s sister. The same kinship tie is different in the concept of the Kayardild language. In the language, according to Wierzbicka (1997, p. 28), Princess Anne would be Prince Charles’ wakatha while Princess Margret would be Queen Elizabeth’s duujinda and Elizabeth would be yakukathu because she was born before Margret.
Different languages categorize color differently. According to Hickerson (1975, p. 317), “Various psychological and linguistic studies show that there are universals of color terminology that reflect inherent psychological properties of the human visual system, particularly based on colors: red, yellow, green, and blue.” These colors are the strongest when paired. Their relationship is reflected in several visual phenomena, such as color blindness. Using one word, several languages reveal language parings, such as red-green and blue-yellow. Hickerson (1975, p. 317) reported that Ainu is an example of a language in the northernmost part of an island in Japan that uses the word siwnin to mean both yellow and blue while hu means red and green colors. These color terms in languages such as Ainu do not discriminate between color shades more accurately, in English, because only people from that specific culture understand it, which shows the possible influence language has on how people perceive color.
The culture of a language’s speakers influences the naming systems in different societies. The naming system is mainly connected to a family. Some culturally specific practices influence the naming of members of each generation. Some people prefer a patronymic naming system, while others prefer a matronymic one. Wierzbicka (1997, p. 29) mentioned that surnames in English are often passed down patrilineally from generation to generation. In addition, some cultures choose to give their children descriptive names. An example is the Nuer people of Africa. People from this region name their children based on birth circumstances, events, or even weather conditions at the time of a child’s birth. Children are also given names of deceased grandparents or anyone from the family for them to be remembered through the new baby. These are some of the practices that offer insight into the values and priorities of a culture in society.
Time and space are another aspect that reveals how culture and language are linked when categorizing the world. Russian and Chinese cultures use more nuanced terms for spatial relationships. Both cultures use cultural keywords that reveal the culture’s members’ thoughts, acts, and feelings. For instance, the Chinese word xiào (‘filial piety’) is embedded in Chinese thinking. According to Goddard (2015, p. 389), the word xiào is used to teach ‘love, respect, obedience, solicitude, devotion, care’ and ‘the utter sense of duty of the children towards the parents, with the implicit understanding that the children will look after the parents in their old age .’On the other hand, Wierzbicka (1997, p. 17) reports that words such as duša (roughly ‘soul’) or sud’ba (roughly ‘fate’) in Russian unravel the balls of attitude and values that are embodied in words and common collocations. Thus revealing the values and beliefs held in diverse cultures.
References
Goddard, C. (2015). Words as carriers of cultural meaning. In J. R. Taylor (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of the Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 380-398.
Hickerson, N. (1975). Two studies of colour: implications for cross-cultural comparability of semantic categories. In M. Dale Kinkade, Kenneth Hale and Oswald Werner (Eds.), Linguistics and Anthropology: In Honor of C. F. Voegelin. Lisse: de Ridder, pp.317–330.
Holmes, J. (2008). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London and New York: Longman.
Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press.
write