The Relation between Language and Culture
Abstract: Different countries have different cultures, and also different language. Language and culture are interdependent and interactional. Language is one of the most important carriers of culture. On the other hand, culture have a great impact on language, that is culture conditioning. Knowing the language and cultural backgrounds can help our communication. Instead, it will cause many communicative barriers. In this paper, we summarize the relationship between language and culture. And example to explain it’s impact on cross-culture communication.
摘要：不同的国家有不同的语言和文化，语言和文化是相互依赖、相互影响的，语言是文化的重要载体，另一方面，文化对语言也有制约作用。了解语言文化知识有助于我们的交际。相反地，缺乏语言文化背景知识必然会导致交际障碍。本文列举了语言与文化的关系，并举例说明了这种关系对跨文化交际的影响。
key words: language, cultures, relationship, communication
关键词：语言，文化，关系，交际
1. Introduction
As we all know that different countries have different cultures, and also different language. Language and culture are interdependent and interactional. Language is one of the most important carriers of culture. On the other hand, culture have a great impact on language, that is culture conditioning.
Language plays a very important role in all human activity. It’s one of the indispensable part of the social life of human. You can not imagine the world would be without language. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of human language is so mystical that people do not acquaint it entirely so far.
Culture is the product of social life and national spirit. In other words, culture is the genetic code of difference among the various nation, country and region. Every country has its own culture formation and individuality. This special culture is one of the most important source of affinity and cohesion of a country. For this reason, we must protect and develop the culture of the various nation, country and region, keep variety of our global culture.
2. Relationship between language and culture
Relationship between language and culture can be summarized as the following:
(1). Language is part of culture. Like other cultural phenomenon, language is also a social phenomenon, it occurred with the production of society, and develops with the development of society. The language is with nationality, different nationalities often have different languages; Language is also human creation. It is the most important spiritual wealth of human society .We can say that language has all the attributes of culture, so language is also a kind of culture, one of the many cultural phenomenons. The human language is not only an integral part of culture, and also the most important part.
(2).Language is the main carrier of culture. Although language is part of culture, other cultural phenomenon generally can't exist being independent from language. Only through language, culture can be preserved, extended and spread.
(3).Language is the foundation of the development of culture. When we said the cultural development, it's pointing to the development on the original basis which is preserved and spread by language. The development of culture cannot do without thinking, and thinking activity cannot do without the language: the development of culture must rely on the collective of creation of social members. Only by using language which is a good communication tool, can social members communicate and achieve mutual understanding. Different culture should learn from each other through language. Above all, culture must use language as tools to develop. So, the language is the foundation of the development of culture.
Above all, we can conclude that language and culture not only in close relationship, but also the special relationship.
3. Culture and language in the language communication
Because language is part of culture, also the carrier of culture and foundation of cultural development, it can reflect the characteristics of national culture and the cultural differences between different nationalities to a maximum extent. From different nationalities' languages, we can find the evidences of different nationality's values, is or not standard, customs, and religious beliefs, social system, and so on. These cultural factors have restriction on language and language communication. But his own people are not always easy to detect that. Only through the comparison of the different nationality's language and language communication, it can be revealed. The so-called "language communication culture", is a special cultural factor implied in the language system which reflects a nation's mental state, values, life style, moral standards, non standard, aesthetic taste, and the customs and habits etc .This cultural factors mainly reflects in the words system , grammar system and pragmatic system of language.
We will illustrate some examples of culture in the language communication through comparison between China and Western Countries.
3.1 greeting
Due to the differences between Chinese and western culture tradition and customs, the way of greeting is, of course, not the same. Because China is a long period of farming community, there’s lot of ‘food’ in the daily expression. When people meet with each other, they will say ‘have you eaten? ’ for greeting. This way of greeting is just the same as ‘hi’ or ‘hello’ in western country. In China, it is a common way to say ‘hello’, but the western people don’t think so. They may think this greeting seems to be saying: ‘I have nothing to eat. Come on. Let’s go to eat something.’ Or ‘ I was going to ask you to go to my house for a dinner.’ All in all, this means that say ‘hello’ invitation to dinner sometimes. Another way of greeting in china is ‘where are you going?’ or ‘where have you been?’. In china, this greeting is just polite formula. But if you use these sentences to greet to western people, they will feel unhappy. Their reaction is likely to be: it’s none of your business! Western people always talk about the weather when they meet. Such as’ the weather is fine. They respect the privacy of others, and will not ask others privacy issues.
In short, when people make a greeting, they should pay attention on different cultures. They should consider the time, place, object, cultural background, social customs and other factors. The use of appropriate greetings can make communication more smooth and natural.
3.2 farewells
Between the social and cultural customs between china and western country are different, the farewells are different, too. For instance, Chinese people go to other people’s homes. When it is the time to say goodbye, they often say: I’d better be going now. You must be very tired or you will have to go to work tomorrow, I should go now. But the American people, by contrast, most of them will find out their reasons to say good-bye. For example, I must say good-bye, my wife is waiting for me or I think I’d better to leave now. Chinese people are always more politely, while westerners are always somewhat straightforward.
3.3 taboos
In cross-cultural communication, taboo is the most sensitive topic. Cultural taboos research therefore becomes an important content of cross-cultural communication. The so-called taboos are the words that people can’t say in daily life or their work. Taboo is almost everywhere, from daily life to the political and economic aspects. We here just talk some about common taboos. In the conversation, western people are unwilling to say their age, income, marriage, love, property, fat, and so on. But in china, it is very normal to talk about marriage, income, love, age and so on. In addition, western people should not talk loud in public places, they always speak in quiet. But Chinese people always talk loud in public places. There are lot of this kind of taboos, taboos language reflects different countries’ culture.
4. Conclusion
In short, language is one of the most important carriers of culture and culture has a great impact on language in conditioning. They both cannot survive with each other. On the other hand, the difference of language and culture may arouse inconvenience and misunderstanding. Therefore, learning the difference of cultures between different countries is very important. Realizing the difference of cultures between different nations is good for us to communicate with different languages.（1312words）
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