Language is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways:

1. people utter refer to common experience. They express facts, ideas or events that are
communicable because they refer to a the knowledge about the world that other people share
Words also reflect authors' attitudes and beliefs, their point of view
2. members of a community or social group express experience and create it through language
for example, speaking on the telephone
3. language is a system of signs that have a cultural value. Speakers identify themselves and
others through language; they view their language as a symbol of their social identity

 What does “Culture” actually mean?

Nature refers to what is born and grows organically
Culture refers to what has been grown and groomed
The word culture evokes the traditional nature debate
Are human beings mainly what nature determines them to be from birth or what culture enables
them to become through socialization and schooling?

The Importance of Both “Culture” and “Nature”: Liberating & Constraining:

-Nature and culture both need each other
-Nature is existed before culture, but without any meaning, culture gave the nature the meanings,
we can consider that culture came first, but this subject is controversial. For example; the
Dickinson poem, the rose is existed but it wouldn’t be useful without the screws who made the
perfume, it wouldn’t be immortal without the poem.

This double effect of culture on the individual - both liberating and constraining -plays
itself out on the social, the historical and the metaphorical planes:
communities of language users:

(A) Social (achieved mainly through 2 notions):

speech community; is the group of people who shares the same linguistic code according to
(ideology, gender..)
discourse community; is a set of way of communication between members of social group to
meet their social needs. For example; teenagers discourse, doctors discourse ...
discourse accent; he topics people choose to talk about, the way they present information, and
the style with which they interact. it is the style of discoursing, Americans are responding to
everything with “thank you!”, French with downplay the thing, “The sweater is quite old”
(B) Historical:
another way of viewing culture it evolved and become solidified over time

(C) Metaphorical: These two layers of culture combined, the social (synchronic) and the historical
(diachronic), have often been called the sociocultural context

socio-cultural context: (imagined communities)

socio-cultural; is the combing of two dimensions; social (synchronic) and history (diachronic).
Third dimension is “imagining” of history or future.
in other words; imagined communities; is the different understanding for words according to
culture, “I have a dream..” for Americans means a lot, when Martin Luther King said it. Lion Milk for
Turkish, birds yogurt for Arabs.

 Insiders vs. Outsiders

Insiders: group of people consider themselves as a community who shares in certain
characteristics against others who are considered as “Outsider”. The powerful members in
communities (or stronger community) have authority to decide the beliefs which consider group as
insider or outsider, like
Orientalism which is described the people of the Middle East by Europeans or other
“Westerners”. Representing culture; there is a struggle who will represent the culture, insider or
outsider, but the problem there are differences even between the insiders.
I think, insiders will be more representers for the culture, but outsider have to check the bias (if
existed).
Hegemony: A term to refer to the predominant organizational form of power and domination across
the economic, political, cultural and ideological domains of a society, or across societies.

Linguistic Relativity : a theory that languages affect the way of thinking of its users, some
scholars put the idea that different people speaks in different ways because their language give
them different ways to express them selves. this theory evolved to be th sapir-whorf hypothesis
A. Ancient; many languages because of people think differently
B. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
The linguistic relativity hypothesis advanced by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.
• Strong version; language with the cultural differences determines thought
• Weak version; Linguistic Determinism: language determine the way of thinking.
. linguistic categories and usage only influence thought