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Lecture 1

Language is closely related to both culture and society. Sociolinguistics examines this relationship, exploring how social factors influence language variation and change. Linguoculturology also studies how aspects of a culture are reflected in its language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis postulates that language influences thought and impacts how speakers experience the world.

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Alexandra Tsapura
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41 views

Lecture 1

Language is closely related to both culture and society. Sociolinguistics examines this relationship, exploring how social factors influence language variation and change. Linguoculturology also studies how aspects of a culture are reflected in its language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis postulates that language influences thought and impacts how speakers experience the world.

Uploaded by

Alexandra Tsapura
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lecture 1: Language and culture.

Society, sociolinguistics, linguoculturology

Introduction to the topic:

- How is language related to society?


- Do you understand what is happening when you use the language?
- Do you know how your use of the language effects how your perception of things, how
you think about relationships, and how you think about yourself?

Definition:
“The study of language in relation to society”

the study of language in relation to social factors, including differences of regional, class, and
occupational dialect, gender differences, and bilingualism.

Sociolinguistics examines all aspects of the relationship between language and


society. ... Social dialectology or variationist sociolinguistics focuses on linguistic
variation in monolingual communities, exploring social reasons for variation and
change, and attitudes to different varieties of the 'same' language.

DEFINING CULTURE:
Culture is so infamously difficult to define that we will not be too definite in our definition.

Culture:
1. The arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation.
2. The beliefs, values, behavior and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.

DEFINING SOCIETY:
Society is also difficult to define, but we know it’s a part of our culture.
Society:
People in general living together in organized communities, with laws and traditions controlling
the way they behave towards one another.

They may not all have the same original culture, but they are a part of a given culture—for
example the United States. People come to the society of the United States from all over the
world. They come with an original culture, but as citizens of the United States they adopt
“American” culture, however, loose a culture it is.

Language is a system for communication. It is sometimes also called a “code” because it has a
set of rules that both people communicating must follow and understand to communicate well.

Language is a way of communicating. The analysis of language took place over the course of
several stages:

1. Phonology—the study of a languages sounds.


2. Morphology—the study of a languages forms and morphemes. For example, cats would
be described as containing two morphemes. Cat, the name for a kind of animal and –s a
morpheme indicating plurality.
3. Lexicon—the study of the words of a language and their meanings.
4. Syntax—the study of the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.

Certainly, all these things are an important part of any language as well, but looking at language
ONLY descriptively can give the impression that none of these elements of a language are
connected—which is obviously not true. Worse, it gives the impression that language has no
relationship to our culture and how we think.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Around the 1950’s linguists began looking at language differently. They began to see how
closely related a person’s language and their culture really are.

Linguoculturology is a new branch of science, which deals with manifestations of


culture of different nations, which became fixed and are reflected in the language.
This relatively new field of linguistic research represents a merger of two distinct
subdisciplines of linguistics: sociolinguistics and culturology.

The subject of linguoculturology is the national forms of existence of nations


which are reproduced in a system of language communication and which are
based upon their cultural possessions. In other words the subject of
linguoculturology is the language picture of the world.

DOCTRINE OF LINGUISTIC RELAVTIVITY

The beginnings of this change start with the doctrine of linguistic relativity. The doctrine of
linguistic relativity states that all known languages and dialects are effective means of
communication.

In the 19th century linguists used to rate languages as primitive and advanced based on an
evolutionary scale of a group’s society. They termed languages advanced and complex if they
were spoken by “civilized” people and if they were spoken by hunters and gatherers, that is
tribal peoples, the language was considered primitive and simple.

A very famous Anthropologist named Franz Boas proved this approach to understanding
language and culture in general to be very wrong.
It became evident to Boas and later others that languages could not be rated on a scale from
simple to complex and that there was no one-to-one relationship between technological
complexity or cultural complexity and linguistic complexity.

All languages known to linguists, regardless of their society are equally complex.
Languages spoken by tribal peoples are as systematically patterned as English or Latin.

This truth is known as linguistic relativity. The parallel concept when studying other cultures is
called cultural relativity. All things are equal and relative to one another.
Boas also convincingly demonstrated that it was necessary to analyze each language in terms of
its own structure. This is not to say that there are no universals in language. There have to be
since all languages have a phonemic system, a morphology, and syntax.

There are two important theories about the nature of language that changed how we look at
and analyze language in any context. These are probably the two most difficult concepts we will
be discussing in the course, but discussing them will prepare you to think in a necessarily
different way about language than you might be use to.

Chomsky
The first, and one of the biggest influences on linguistics was a book by Noam Chomsky called
“Syntactic Structure.”

Chomsky’s book advocated a new method of linguistic analysis called:

**TRANSFORMATATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

Transformational grammar seeks to identify rules (transformations) that govern relations


between parts of a sentence, on the assumption that beneath such aspects as word order a
fundamental structure exists.

At it’s most basic, this approach to studying language says that language is more than the surface
phenomena, i.e. sounds, words, and word order. Beneath the surface all languages share a limited
set of organizing principles.

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS
A second important development in linguistics is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Sapir and Whorf were two linguists who believed that different languages produce different
ways of thinking. They argued that languages lead their speakers to think about things in
particular ways.

The central idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language functions,


not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also as a way of defining
experience for its speakers.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS—AGAIN
Now what does this mean for sociolinguistics?

The inter-relationship of language and culture is continued in the process of socialization. That is
language is used to transmit culture from one generation to the next. Culture is transmitted
verbally. In fact language is our medium for learning most things. We learn our cultural history
through language, our cultural concepts, morals and values, and in particular, our social norms
and constraints.

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