Culture and Language

Language is the means by which we conduct our social lives. When used in communicaties contexts, it is
bound up in multiple and complex ways. Words express our common experience ; they express facts, ideas, events
thanks to a stock of knowledge about the world that people share. Words also express the author’s attitude, beliefs
and also those of others .

Language expresses a cultural reality.

Members of a community donot only express experience, they create experience through language ; they
give meaning through a medium, be it by speaking on the phone, face-to-face, writing a letter, or sending an Email,
reading the newspaper, interpreting a graph or chart. The way people use the spoken, written, visual medium
creates meaning. The language used is understandable to the group they belong to, for example a speaker’s tone of
voice, accent, conversational style, gestures, facial expressions. Through all verbal and nonverbal aspects,

language embodies a cultural reality.

Language is a system of signs having a cultural value. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of
language. They view their language as a symbol of their social identity. The prohibition of its use is often perceived
by its speakers as a rejection of their social group and culture. Thus

Language embodies a cultural reality

Nature, Culture, Language

One way of thinking about culture is to contrast it with Nature.

Nature : what is born and grows organically.

Culture : what has been grown and groomed (taken care of). Culture comes from ‘colere’, meaning ‘to cultivate’

Essential Oils are wrung

By Emily Dickinson

Esssential oils –- are wrung-

The attar from the Rose

Be not expressed by Suns –alone-

It is the gift of screws-

The general rose –decay -

But this- in Lady’s Drawer

Make Summer- when the Lady lie

In Ceaseless Rosemary-

This poem is an allegorical comment on poems as a personal challenge to death. On a surface level, this
poem recalls how a funeral takes place surrounding the dead with fragrant rosemary. She hopes that future
generations will appreciate this cultural funeral custom and the value of using rose perfume. It is also a poem on
how Nature (the rose) and Culture ( the Attar) are interconnected. The poem would not have been written if there
were no roses.The central symbol is ‘the attar’ (perfume from the esences of roses) that will lie in a lady’drawer,
maybe this poem that will be found after her death; The roses are wrung meaning they are squeezed or pressed to
give their essences. In the poem of Emily Dickinson about Roses, the use of’the general rose’ which represents
Nature, ‘the lady’ as language, and the Attar or fragrance of the roses as culture. This poem puts language and
culture to a relationship where they can influence each other in many ways. Naturally, a rose is just one of beautiful
flowers which can be wilted at any time ; Unfortunately, the natural characteristic of a flower makes it only beautiful
when we see it directly. On the flipside, culture and language can do things nature cannot. Time has no effect on
culture and language. It makes people imagine how beautiful the rose is . Every time someone mentions the rose, it
will do so thanks to the definition of the Rose kept in the culture of the society and thanks to language(the language
they heard). A Rose may be only a kind of flower , but culturally , a rose is a sign of true love and sometimes can also
be a sign of a lady. The lady and the Rose are not immortal when the perfume maker changes the rose petal into
highly costly perfume. The lady can use the perfume and the fragrance of the rose made immortal. We can conclude
that culture never dies when language makes it immortal. We can know about the culture of one community
because of language. Language and culture support each other in society, and need each other.

Language can make culture immortal ; it is very powerful giving an identity by preserving the culture  of the
community. In its turn, culture preserves the past, here a past tradition of a funeral custom using rose perfume.
People identify with their past also through their cultural everyday practises which have become a common stock of
knowledge and experience for their present and future.

To come back to words and meanings through etiquette, expressions of politeness, social dos and don’ts shape
people’s behavior through child rearing, behavioral upbringing, schooling, professional training. The use of written
language is also shaped and socialized through culture. Not only what is proper to write, to whom, in what
circumtances, but also which text genres are appropriate (the application form, the business letter, the political
pamphlet) because they are sanctioned (=approved) by cultural conventions. These ways with language or norms of
interaction or interpretation form part of the invisible ritual imposed by culture on language users.

2. Communities of Language users :

Social conventions and norms of social appropriateness are products of the communities of language users. As in
the E.Dickinson’s poem, poets and readers , florists, and lovers, rose press manufacturers, perfume makers and users
create meanings through their words and actions ; Culture both liberates people from oblivion , anonymity, and the
randomness of nature and constrains them by imposing on them a structure and principles of selection. This double
effect of culture on the individual –both liberating and constraining_ plays itself out on the social, historical, and the
metaphorical planes. Let us examine each of these planes in turn.

People identify themselves as members of a social group (family, neighbourhood, professional or ethnic affiliation,
nation) acquire common ways of viewing the world through their interactions with other members of the same
group. These views are reinforced through institutions, like the family, the school, the workplace, the church, the
government, other sites of socialization throughout their lives.

To be continued…..