LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Language and culture It has been seen that language is much more than the external expression and communication of internal thoughts formulated independently of their verbalization. In demonstrating the inadequacy and inappropriateness of such a view of language, attention has already been drawn to the ways in which one's mother tongue is intimately and in all sorts of details related to the rest of one's life in a community and to smaller groups within that community. This is true of all peoples and all languages; it is a universal fact about language. Anthropologists speak of the relations between language and culture. It is, indeed, more in accordance with reality to consider language as a part of culture. Culture is here being used, as it is throughout this article, in the anthropological sense, to refer to all aspects of human life insofar as they are determined or conditioned by membership in a society. The fact that a man eats or drinks is not in itself cultural; it is a biological necessity that he does so for the preservation of life. That he eats particular foods and refrains from eating other substances, though they may be perfectly edible and nourishing, and that he eats and drinks at particular times of day and in certain places are matters of culture, something acquired by man as a member of society, according to the now-classic definition of culture by the English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor. As thus defined and envisaged, culture covers a very wide area of human life and behaviour; and language is manifestly a part, probably the most important part, of it. Although the faculty of language acquisition and language use is innate and inherited, and there is legitimate debate over the extent of this innateness, every individual's language is acquired by man as a member of society, along with and at the same time as other aspects of that society's culture in which he is brought up. Society and language are mutually indispensable. Language can have developed only in a social setting, however this may have been structured, and human society in any form even remotely resembling what is known today or is recorded in history could be maintained only among people speaking and understanding a language in common use. Transmission of language and culture Language is transmitted culturally; that is, it is learned. To a lesser extent it is taught, when parents deliberately encourage their children to talk and to respond to talk, correct their mistakes, and enlarge their vocabulary. But it must be emphasized that children very largely acquire their mother tongue (i.e., their first language) by grammar construction from exposure to a random collection of utterances that they encounter. What is classed as language teaching in school either relates to second-language acquisition or, insofar as it concerns the pupils' first language, is in the main directed at reading and writing, the study of literature, formal grammar, and alleged standards of correctness, which may not be those of all the pupils' regional or social dialects. All of what goes under the title of language teaching at school presupposes and relies on the prior knowledge of a first language in its basic vocabulary and essential structure, acquired before school age. If language is transmitted as part of culture, it is no less true that culture as a whole is transmitted very largely through language, insofar as it is explicitly taught. The fact that mankind has a history in the sense that animals do not is entirely the result of language. So far as researchers can tell, animals learn through spontaneous imitation or through imitation taught by other animals. This does not exclude the performance of quite complex and substantial pieces of cooperative physical work, such as a beaver's dam or an ants' nest, nor does it preclude the intricate social organization of some species, such as bees. But it does mean that changes in organization and work will be the gradual result of mutation cumulatively reinforced by survival value; those groups whose behaviour altered in any way that increased their security from predators or from famine would survive in greater numbers than others. This would be an extremely slow process, comparable to the evolution of the different species themselves. There is no reason to believe that animal behaviour has materially altered during the period available for the study of human history, say the last 5,000 years or so, except, of course, when man's intervention by domestication or other forms of interference has itself brought about such alterations. Nor do members of the same species differ markedly in behaviour over widely scattered areas, again apart from differences resulting from human interference. Bird songs are reported to differ somewhat from place to place within species, but there is little other evidence for areal divergence. By contrast with this unity of animal behaviour, human cultures are as divergent as are human languages over the world, and they can and do change all the time, sometimes with great rapidity, as among the industrialized nations of the 20th century. The processes of linguistic change and its consequences will be treated below. Here, cultural change in general and its relation to language will be considered. By far the greatest part of learned behaviour, which is what culture involves, is transmitted by vocal instruction, not by imitation. Some imitation is clearly involved, especially in infancy, in the learning process, but proportionately this is hardly significant. Through the use of language, any skills, techniques, products, modes of social control, and so on can be explained, and the end results of anyone's inventiveness can be made available to anyone else with the intellectual ability to grasp what is being said. Spoken language alone would thus vastly extend the amount of usable information in any human community and speed up the acquisition of new skills and the adaptation of techniques to changed circumstances or new environments. With the invention and diffusion of writing, this process widened immediately, and the relative permanence of writing made the diffusion of information still easier. Printing and the increase in literacy only further intensified this process. Modern techniques for almost instantaneous transmission of the written and spoken word all over the globe, together with the rapid translation services now available between the major languages of the world, have made it possible for usable knowledge of all sorts to be made accessible to people almost anywhere in the world in a very short time. This accounts for the great rapidity of scientific, technological, political, and social change in the contemporary world. All of this, whether ultimately for the good or ill of mankind, must be attributed to the dominant role of language in the transmission of culture. Linguistic change Every language has a history; and, as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the course of the learned transmission of a language from one generation to another. This is just part of the differences between human culture and animal behaviour. Languages change in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and word meanings (semantic change). These changes are mostly very gradual in their operation, becoming noticeable only cumulatively over the course of several generations. But, in some areas of vocabulary, particular words closely related to rapid cultural change are subject to equally rapid and therefore noticeable changes within a generation or even within a decade. In the 20th century the vocabulary of science and technology is an outstanding example. The same is also true of those parts of vocabulary that are involved in fashionable slangs and jargons, whose raison d'tre in promoting group, particularly age-group, solidarity depends on their being always fresh and distinctive. Old slangs date, as any reading of a novel or visit to a film more than 10 years old is apt to show. The rapid obsolescence of young people's slangs is equally to be seen in the unsuccessful efforts of some well-intentioned older persons who vainly attempt to cultivate the speech styles of present-day youth groups in a misdirected attempt to bridge the generation gap (this last phrase is an example of mid-20th-century pseudoscientific slang). Diversification of languages Changes through time In the structural aspects of language, their pronunciation and grammar, and in vocabulary less closely involved in rapid cultural movement, the processes of linguistic change are best observed by comparing written records of a language over extended periods. This is most readily seen by English speakers through setting side by side present-day English texts with 18th-century English, the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible, Shakespearean English, Chaucer's English, and the varieties of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) that survive in written form. Noticeably, as one goes back in time, the effort required in understanding increases, and, while people do not hesitate to speak of Shakespearean English, they are more doubtful about Chaucer, and for the most part Old English texts are as unintelligible to a modern English speaker as, for example, texts in German. It is clear that the differences involved include word meanings, grammar, and, so far as this can be reconstructed, pronunciation. Similar evidence, together with what is known of the cultural history of the peoples concerned, makes clear the continuous historical connections linking French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian with the spoken (vulgar) Latin of the western Roman Empire. This group constitutes the Romance subfamily of languages and is an example of how, as the result of linguistic change over a wide area, a group of distinct, though historically related, languages comes into being. In the transmission of a language from parent to child, slight deviations in all aspects of language use occur all the time, and as the child's speech contacts widen he confronts a growing range of slight differences in personal speech forms, some of them correlating with social or regional differences within a community, these speech differences themselves being the results of the transmission process. As a consequence, the child's speech comes to differ slightly from that of his parents' generation. In urbanized communities an additional factor is involved: children have been shown to be effectively influenced by the speech habits of their peer groups once they have made contacts with them in and out of school. Such changes, though slight at the time, are progressively cumulative. Since ready intercommunication is a primary purpose of language, as long as a community remains unitary, with strong central direction and a central cultural focus, such changes will not go beyond the limits of intercomprehensibility. But in more scattered communities and in larger language areas, especially when cultural and administrative ties are weakened and broken, these cumulative deviations in the course of generations give rise to wider regional differences. Such differences take the form of dialectal differentiation as long as there is some degree of mutual comprehension but eventually result in the emergence of distinct languages. This is what happened in the history of the colloquial Latin of the western Roman Empire, and it can be assumed that a similar course of events gave rise to the separate Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and some others), though in this family the original unitary language is not known historically but inferred as Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic and tentatively assigned to early in the 1st millennium BC as the period before separation began. This is how language families have developed. Most but not all of the languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European family, so-called because in addition it includes the classical Indian language Sanskrit and most of the modern languages of northern India and Pakistan. It includes as subfamilies the two families just mentioned, Romance and Germanic, and several others. It is assumed that the subfamilies, and from them the individual languages of the Indo-European family, are ultimately derived from a unitary language spoken somewhere in eastern Europe or western Asia (its exact location is still under debate), perhaps 5,000 years ago. This unitary language has itself been referred to as Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European, the common parent language, or the original language (Ursprache) of the family. But it must be emphasized that, whatever it may have been like, it was just one language among many and of no special status in itself. It was certainly in no way the original language of mankind or anything like it. It had its own earlier history, of which virtually nothing can be inferred, and it was, of course, very recent in relation to the time span of human language itself. What is really special about such parent or proto- languages is that they represent the farthest point to which our available techniques and resources enable us to reconstruct the prehistory of our attested and living languages. Similarly constituted families of languages derived from inferred common sources have been established for other parts of the world; for example, Altaic, covering Turkish and several languages of Central Asia, and Bantu, containing many of the languages of central and southern Africa. If enough material in the form of written records from past ages were available, it would be possible to group all the world's languages into historically related families. In addition, an answer could perhaps be posited to the question of whether all languages are descended from a single original language or whether languages emerged independently among several groups of early peoples (the rival theories of monogenesis and polygenesis, a controversy more confidently disputed in the 19th century than today). In actual fact, written records, when they are available, go back only a fraction of the time in which human speech has been developed and used, and over much of the globe written records are nonexistent. In addition, there are no other linguistic fossils comparable to the fossils of geological prehistory. This means that the history and prehistory of languages will not be able to go back more than a few thousand years BC and will be much more restricted in language areas in which few or no written records are available, as in much of Africa and in South America. Many languages will remain not related with certainty to any family. Nevertheless, the methods of historical linguistics, involving the precise and systematic comparison of word forms and word meanings (see further linguistics: Historical [diachronic] linguistics), have produced remarkable results in establishing language families on the same basis as Indo-European was established, in far less favourable fields. But any attempt by these means to get back to the origin of language or to reconstruct man's original language, if indeed there was one, is quite beyond the reach of science and will remain so. Meaning and style in language The whole object and purpose of language is to be meaningful. Languages have developed and are constituted in their present forms in order to meet the needs of communication in all its aspects. It is because the needs of human communication are so various and so multifarious that the study of meaning is probably the most difficult and baffling part of the serious study of language. Traditionally, language has been defined, as in the definition quoted above, as the expression of thought, but, as was seen, this involves far too narrow an interpretation of language or far too wide a view of thought to be serviceable. The expression of thought is just one among the many functions performed by language in certain contexts. Types of meaning Structural, or grammatical, meaning First, one must recognize that the meaning of any sentence comprises two parts, the meanings of the words it contains and the structural or grammatical meaning carried by the sentence itself. In English the dog chased the cat and the boy chased the cat differ in meaning because dog and boy are different words with different word meanings; the same applies to equivalent sentences in other languages. The two sentences the dog chased the cat and the cat chased the dog, though containing exactly the same words, are different in meaning because the different word orders distinguish what are conventionally called subject and object. In Latin the two corresponding sentences would be distinguished not by word order, which is grammatically indifferent and largely a matter of style, but by different shapes in the lexical equivalents of dog and cat. In Japanese the grammatical distinction of subject and object, normally marked by the word order subject-object-verb, can be reinforced by a subject particle after the first word and an object particle after the second. The formal resources of any language for making distinctions in the structural meanings of sentences are limited by two things: the linear (time) dimension of speaking and the limited memory span of the human brain. Writing copies the time stream of speech with the linear flow of scripts. Diagrams and pictures employ two dimensions, and models employ three; but writing is partially relieved of memory-span restrictions by the permanence of visual marks. Because written texts are almost entirely divorced from oral pronunciation, sentence length and sentence complexity can be carried to extremes, as may be observed in some legal and legislative documents that are virtually unintelligible if read aloud. Within these linear restrictions, distinctions corresponding to the main uses of language can be made. All languages can employ different sentence structures to state facts (declarative), to ask questions (interrogative), and to enjoin or forbid some course of action (imperative). More delicate means exist to soften or modify these basic distinctions: e.g., It's cold today, isn't it?; Isn't it still raining?; Shut the door, would you mind; Don't be long, will you? Languages use their resources differently for these purposes, but, generally speaking, each seems to be equally flexible structurally. The principal resources are word order, word form, syntactic structure, and, in speech, pitch and stress placement. In English, as an example, a word or phrase can be highlighted by being placed first in the sentence when it would not normally occur there: compare he can't bear loud noises with loud noises he can't bear or loud noises, he can't bear them. The object noun or noun phrase can also be put first by making the sentence passive; this allows the original subject to be omitted if one does not know or does not want to refer to an agent: the town was destroyed (by the revolutionaries). Within and together with all these possibilities, almost any word can be made contrastively prominent by being stressed (spoken more loudly) or by being uttered on a higher pitch, and very often these two are combined: I asked you for red roses (not yellow); I meant it for you (not her); I know nothing about it (someone else may). Prominence is especially associated with intonation, itself an important carrier of structural meaning in speech. One may state facts, ask questions, and give instructions with a variety of intonations indicating, along with visible gestures, different attitudes, feelings, and social and personal relations between speaker and hearer. The possibilities of expressing structural meanings are a most important part of any language. They are acquired along with the rest of one's first language in childhood and are learned more slowly and with more difficulty in mastering a second or later language. Scholars are still only at the beginning of a full formal analysis of these resources, as far as most languages are concerned, and are still further from an adequate understanding of all the semantic functions performed by means of these resources.